AI Summary
5 min readThe episode opens with Charlie Warzel asking Julie Beck how a TikTok binge makes her feel. “Oh, like sick,” she says. “It’s like when the aliens get you. They take you up and then they probe you. And then when you come back down, you don’t know what happened. It’s lost time… it promotes self-loathing in a way that truly no other activity does.” That visceral description sets the stage for a conversation about what Warzel calls “the scrolling backlash”—the growing sense that people are exhausted by their phones, by algorithmic feeds, and by the feeling that their attention is being manipulated toward things that don’t make them feel whole.
The ambivalence at the center of the backlash
Beck is the host of How to Touch Grass, an Atlantic podcast series about renegotiating our relationship with technology. She tells Warzel that the animating question of the series is not simply “how to log off,” but how to decide how much of our lives we actually want to spend on devices versus inhabiting the embodied world. The series emerged from a personal pattern: Beck has deleted and re-downloaded TikTok four or five times. She noticed that whenever she was on the app, the algorithm kept serving her videos about how to be offline more—how to heal your attention span, how to live more analog. The irony was the point.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:52) **The Feeling of Scrolling** - Charlie and Julie Beck open by describing the visceral, sick feeling of a phone-scrolling binge, comparing it to lost time and self-loathing.
- 2 (04:18) **Why "Touch Grass"? The Cultural Shift** - Julie explains the origin of the series and why the phrase "touch grass" captures a widespread desire to renegotiate our relationship with devices.
- 3 (08:33) **Nostalgia and the Value of Getting Lost** - The conversation shifts to nostalgia, particularly among Gen Z, and whether losing the ability to be truly vulnerable without a phone is a real loss.
- 4 (11:03) **Nostalgia as a Guide, Not an Escape** - Julie argues that the Gen Z nostalgia for a pre-internet era is less about wanting to time travel and more about expressing that something in their current life isn't working.
- 5 (13:56) **The Cost of Abundance** - The podcast explores the trade-off between the abundance of information/entertainment and the cost to attention, body image, and anxiety.
- 6 (18:21) **The DIY Solution vs. The Draconian Fantasy** - Julie and Charlie discuss the exhausting reality of managing technology, where the "log off forever" fantasy is appealing but impractical for most.
- 7 (19:43) **Learning, Outsourcing, and Building Your Brain** - A clip from cognitive psychologist Michelle Miller frames teaching as a "highest and best expression of humanity," leading to a discussion on how AI threatens the process of building our own minds.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
A lot of people are getting tired of their phone—sick of the algorithms and overwhelmed by what can feel like a loss of control. The Atlantic staff writer Julie Beck was a part of a team that dug into why and how people are trying to renegotiate their relationships with technology. They just released a five-part podcast series called “How to Touch Grass,” and in this episode, Galaxy Brain host Charlie Warzel talks to Beck about why people are nostalgic for pre-Internet days, how our brains are changing, and the good that can come from getting lost.
Listen to the full “How to Touch Grass” series at The Atlantic, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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