ing else, you irrationally think that the thing it reminded you of is telling you something about the thing. It probably isn't. That's just two things that remind you of each other.

But here's what it reminds me of. When I used to own restaurants locally, when I saw a restaurant start to serve brunch when normally they were just a lunch and dinner place, as soon as they would offer brunch you knew they were going out of business. Do you know why? Because brunch is a terrible business. It's like a last-ditch thing to do. Like if you've given up on making money the normal way, you try to do brunch. It never works. It's like the ultimate thing that never works.

Nobody ever goes to the lunch and dinner place for brunch. Do you know why? Because they're used to it as the lunch and dinner place. They can't really — it doesn't really ever become a breakfast place. The only places that do it are breakfast places. If a place is a breakfast place, people go to breakfast there. Otherwise their minds just can't wrap around it.

So when I see CNN trying to scoop up the leftovers from Bill Maher on HBO, that looks to me a lot like brunch, if you know what I mean. Sort of a Hail Mary, desperation, try-anything kind of thing. But if I want to look at it as a more aggressive approach, I would say they're testing out their audience to see if they can maybe compete for his full show. What do you think?

I don't know if he'd want to do it every night though. I don't think he wants to do a nightly show. But maybe he would. Maybe he would. You never know.

My music teacher — well, I won't say it. I'll just say a music teacher. I shouldn't have said that and now I can't do the story because I didn't want to identify it. Skipping that story. Going right to the next one.

So does it seem to you that kids are getting dumber because of smartphones? How many would say that the children, the youth, are getting dumber because of smartphones? A lot of people say yes, somewhat reflexively. Now what do you think you would find — don't do this yet, but what do you think you would find if you were to go to Google and Google "are smartphones making children dumber"? What do you think you'd find as the top result from Google, who I believe would like everybody to use a smartphone?

Do you think that Google would say, oh, here's the research showing these smartphones, which were a big part of it, are bad for you? What do you think? Well, the top result, or one of the top results, or actually the top curated results — so if you go to Google and you look for something that other people have looked for a lot, Google will help you by curating a quick hit that's like all you need to know. You can look deeper, but it's basically the answer to the question. But it's curated, meaning it's not just a natural way that you search and the good stuff comes up first. Somebody at Google decided that the first thing you should see when you click on it is this: The arguments that smartphones are making us dumber don't hold up. Explain, some PhD cognitive scientist, blah blah. And that's the opposite: that smartphones are making us smarter.

What do you think about that? Do you think smartphones make you dumber or make you smarter? Well, maybe there's a trick to it. Maybe there's a trick. Here's the trick. If I say to you, are smartphones making you smarter, who is "you"? See, it seems obvious, right? You is you, and then your phone is separate. Your phone is there and this is you.

But this answer that smartphones are making you smarter treats you like a cyborg. You're part phone and part person. And if you look at the person as part phone, connected to the internet and part person, we're way smarter. What do you think of that? So it might be true that the organic part of our cyborg being is getting some less abilities. Yeah, it might be decreasing as memorization ability. But at the same time we're no longer just an organic entity. We're a cyborg. We're part machine, part human. And the machine part is awesome. You know, it more than makes up for what we're losing in cognitive abilities.

So do you buy that? And do you buy that it's a total coincidence that Google, a company that would really like you to look at a screen a lot, that a big company like that wants you to know that you're just getting better and stronger and smarter because you're part computer and part person? And how could that be bad?

Now there are lots of studies that would suggest the opposite. So other studies that don't look at you as a cyborg and see you just as your organic part, there's lots of indications that we're getting more distracted and shorter retention spans, that kind of stuff.

Can we tie a few things together here? So I did an unscientific Twitter poll and I asked people what will destroy the lives of more children. And the choices were pandemic policies — so that would include everything from vaccinations to masks to shutdowns to Zoom class, all that. So the pandemic policies, or smartphones and social media being called out as a big part of that, or COVID-19 itself, you know, the actual virus.

So the number of people who thought that the most people of these choices that COVID-19 would destroy the lives of more children was 2%. Two percent thought COVID was the thing that would destroy the most children. Coming in second was all of the pandemic policies put together, 25%. Twenty-five percent. That's about a quarter of the people. Interesting.

The other people said 73% said it was the smartphones and social media. I don't want to make too much of the 25%, but what do you think? Seventy-three percent think the smartphone was worse than everything in the pandemic. Seventy-three percent think it was worse than the COVID itself and worse than the response to the COVID, from vaccinations to masks to Zoom school.

So that's how many people think smartphones are like a serious danger to children. Do you see a big movement to ban smartphones for children? I don't. There's none, is there? I tweeted it the other day and I got a lot of support, but there's nothing in the government that's going to ban smartphones now because the big tech companies have too much control. That's never going to happen.

Can we stop pretending we care about children? Could we just stop lying about it? Because I feel like it's bad enough that we're putting children in these situations. That's bad enough. But we're also lying about it while we're doing it. Obviously we don't care about children. In fact, I will go further. I believe wars, general wars, the kind where you're shooting and killing, wars are about sacrificing young people to protect old people, aren't they? You put the young people on the front line, cannon fodder, to protect the old people and the retirements. We've never cared about young people. It's just never been.

And in fact, if you go back for most of civilization, children were just an asset that could maybe make you some money or protect you from your enemies. But basically it wasn't all about the kids. The kids were just like the animals. You know, they're just part of the system. So I find it distasteful that we even pretend that we care about children when it's so obvious we don't.

So obvious. Do you know why parents give up on phones when they should be tough? Why do parents give up and say, all right, you can have your phone but not after 9 p.m. Okay, you can have your phone after 9 p.m. Why do most parents do that? Because it's too hard to take it away. It's just too hard. And the kid is less trouble when they're on their phone. They're not making trouble in the back seat of the car. It's sort of like television. You know, people use television as a babysitter because it works. It works really well. And the phones are just that.

So I think we're destroying our children. Seventy-three percent of you know it completely. And at least the pandemic policies are mopping up whatever you haven't destroyed with smartphones. But do you see any indication — so look at the state of our public schools. Look at our public schools. Just all of it. Just all of it. Look at smartphones and then look at how we treated kids during the pandemic and you tell me that we care about children. Seriously, tell me we care about children.

Now I do think that every parent does. I believe that. I believe every parent cares about their children, and a lot. No different than it never has been. But as an entity, a group, as a country, you can't tell us we care about children. Come on. Yeah, there's fentanyl. Fentanyl is just an obvious one. Stop saying we care about the young. We don't. If we wouldn't do any — you know, homeschooling is growing, but homeschooling is a growth from individual parents