Scribble

Audie Cornish

00:00:03

'So there's this term in podcasting, "always on." It means that in a 52-week year, we're going to deliver you, dear listener, 50 shows.

Clare Duffy

00:00:12

Producing at that level requires a quick pace, and it means that too often we don't have the time to reflect on what we've learned or how the stories relate to each other.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:00:22

So today we've gathered three of our busiest "always on" podcasters to talk about the stories that crossed into all of our feeds in 2025.

Audie Cornish

00:00:33

I'm Audie Cornish and on The Assignment I cover culture and politics and the side stories that eventually make their way to the front page.

Clare Duffy

00:00:40

I'm Clare Duffy, and on Terms of Service, I cover new technologies including facial recognition, generative AI, and how we can navigate the rapid changes they're making to society.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:00:52

And I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a practicing neurosurgeon and CNN's chief medical correspondent. On my podcast, Chasing Life, I cover the worlds of health and medicine, no surprise. But also hopefully teaching people how to lead healthier and happier lives. And I'll tell you right off the bat, one way to do that is by spending time with your friends and colleagues, getting that connection, sharing what you know. So pull up a chair, join us. This is the CNN Podcast 2025 Roundtable. Stay with us.

Audie Cornish

00:01:30

All right, super friends, unite.

Clare Duffy

00:01:33

Super friends, unite.

00:01:36

All right. So we're trying to think of like, how do we talk about what's going on at the end of this very kind of strange year? Strange for a couple of reasons that I realized had a lot to do with like your gigs, like your column, because we have the ascendance of MAHA culture, right? Make America Healthy Again and RFK and all the dialogue that happens with that. And then also every other story I have done this week usually ends with some version of, "so then AI" and like talking about AI in this really intense way where it's both exerting a lot of pressure on all of us, but also no one fully understands what's going on, where it is going, how much money, its effect on the economy. It's just like a wild mix of things. So I just figured, let me bring in some experts. What did you think was the biggest story in your corner of the internet this year?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:02:33

Clare, you want to go first?

Clare Duffy

00:02:35

'Sure. Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting, too, Audie, I feel like your intro and tying together the sort of rise of MAHA and the political stories that we've seen this year are so interconnected with the tech world and just sort of the way that social media and the way the internet works has set the stage for-.

Audie Cornish

00:02:50

Oh, really? Because I thought those were wildly disparate things. You're saving the day.

Clare Duffy

00:02:54

It set the state for that. Yeah. But, no, I think, to me, the biggest story this year has just been the way we've seen so many people incorporating AI into their everyday lives. And in some ways that has been a benefit to people. People are learning how to engage with this new technology that at least Silicon Valley says is going to change the world. But I think we've also started to see the sort of potential downsides of that technology, certainly for children, which I know we're going to get to. But the mental health implications, I think, of this technology are huge. And I think there are really big questions about how it changes the way that we all relate to each other as people. And so to me, that's been the biggest story of this year is just the way we've started to see people forming relationships with AI and what that means for individuals and also for all of us communally.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:03:49

I have to say that I don't think there's a part of my life now that AI hasn't affected as a doctor, as a journalist, as a dad. It's really, it's interesting. And in the medical world, I feel like people are really bullish on AI. I mean, first of all, most patients have already been affected by it, whether they realize it or not. And it's, interesting as a guy in his mid fifties now, I watch my residents and my medical students who've become so facile with it so quickly. I mean, so I'll see my medical students on their phones, walking into patient's room, having a conversation with Perplexity or ChatGPT or OpenEvidence, whichever platform they're using.

Audie Cornish

00:04:26

So that's not considered cheating. Like you're not the boss looking at them like, ugh, you're learning nothing.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:04:32

'Here - that's a good question

Audie Cornish

00:04:35

I spy some judgment Sanjay Gupta, and everyone thinks you're so nice. Well, now we're going to find out.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:04:42

It's not so much judgment, but there's always this desire to sort of say, Hey, look, pretend that the technology doesn't exist. And like, how would you sort of power through this or learn this without that technology? And you know, we've seen this with other adoptions of new technologies in the medical world. When we started doing operations differently, where people were using tools to basically navigate their operations as opposed to understanding the anatomy as well. I think there was always this desire from the attendings to say, hey, man, that's cheating. You have to learn this for real and pretend that the technology doesn't exist. But the response you often get is, but the technology does exist. And this is the world in which we live. Why do we always have to pretend that we're going to live in a world where the technology, doesn't exist? And it's a weird thing.

Audie Cornish

00:05:30

Yeah, I can see how it could happen because the medical industry is so ripe for this, right? Like, no offense, a lot of you have bad handwriting, like, there's always this you have to, like, it's relying on recall, right? That's why every medical show is about a guy who has a photographic memory because none of us can like wrap our minds around the idea that you have volumes of data in your mind that somehow can help you figure out a diagnosis. And, like, that's what AI does great, right? Like scrub, look, scrub, look, and the part of me that is a cynic is like what happens when the power goes out? You know, like I don't want that doctor who has never done a surgery without it. I don't want that doctor who's only Perplexitied their way through the process in case we're doing it by candlelight.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:06:20

You know, it's funny you say that, Audie, because I actually said that same thing to one of my residents the other day, pretend the power has gone out and now you still have to do this operation. And the response to me basically was, hey, we would probably wait for the power to come back on.

Audie Cornish

00:06:34

No. That's not how it works. What? No.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:06:36

'I'm so dependent on it now, you know, I'm not going to do five-digit math without a calculator, right? I'm going to wait 'til my calculator is powered up. But I hear you. It's interesting, but I think sometimes we sort of hand-wring over how much should we slow roll the adoption of these new technologies and sometimes it just is.

Audie Cornish

00:06:59

Yeah.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:06:59

You know, for them, It just is. So the idea of saying Hey, imagine a world without, it's a weird, sort of, conceit for people who are now growing up in this world.

Audie Cornish

00:07:08

It's also uniquely Western, uniquely American, like our power will always be good. Like everything will always good instead of like, cause they, you know, they don't really deal with scarcity so well.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:07:20

Right.

Audie Cornish

00:07:20

And Clare, the thing I found fascinating about AI is the descriptions of it. And we just talked about this with Done O'Sullivan of like the kind of religious fervor with which people talk about it. Like, the people who are literally like, listen, we are going to "X" the greatest thing ever. And the people who, without fail, write some white paper that's like, here we have three years before AI takes over and the whole world is collapsed. And these are such, like the gap between these two perceptions from people in the industry is like absolutely baffling to me and is almost scarier than believing in one of those paths or the other.

Clare Duffy

00:08:04

'Right. Well, it's almost like part of the point is just to paralyze people into doing nothing because either alternative feels so scary and extreme. One of my favorite interviews from this year was your interview that you did with Karen Hao about her book on OpenAI. And I feel like she, her reporting shows this so well, just the way that they have presented this as an inevitable thing that is coming and therefore everybody should get on board with it and start using it because it's going to change your job and it's going to change education so the best thing that you can do is engage with it and use it because its coming. And I feel like her reporting does such a good job of showing the fact that it doesn't really have to be this way like there is this investment in building these massive data centers and building out this potentially all-knowing, more intelligent than humans, technology. And yet there is a way that we could do this on a smaller scale or a scale that rolls out on a less advanced timeline. And it's potentially better for both people and the environment and the way that our culture is able to sort of adapt around it. But I do think that that religious fervor has been beneficial to Silicon Valley. Certainly, from a political perspective, they need these massive resources to build out this technology. And so convincing people that it is necessary for national security, it is necessary for the economy, that is helping them get the resources that they need to do the thing that they think they need to. I think the question is, there's still this huge gap between the potential that they say this has to cure cancer and to make it so that everybody can work two days a week.

Audie Cornish

00:09:43

Yeah. Notice how cure cancer is the first thing. People think they can sell you anything...

Clare Duffy

00:09:46

Always.

Audie Cornish

00:09:46

If they say it'll cure cancer.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:09:49

Pretty good selling point.

Clare Duffy

00:09:50

And yet.

Audie Cornish

00:09:50

Yeah, and meanwhile, all they've given us is, like, delivery. You know what I mean? Like, DoorDash. It's like, they haven't exactly gotten there yet.

Clare Duffy

00:09:58

Or AI slop video feeds. Yeah, so I think there's this huge gulf and they really need to prove to people what it's going to take and what they're going to do to bridge that gulf.

Audie Cornish

00:10:07

Sanjay, did I make that up, is the promise of longer lives and health the path to deregulating our hearts? Do you know what I mean? To saying, like, sure, build that data center because this is going to change the world and could cure diseases.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:10:25

Look, I think, I don't think you're making that up. And I think a lot of people are saying this. Some of the people who are saying this are surprising to me because I would have thought they would have been more tempered in terms of their enthusiasm for this.

Audie Cornish

00:10:40

You mean in the medical community or the tech community?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:10:42

Sorry, no, I'm talking about the medical community.

Audie Cornish

00:10:44

Oh, interesting. Say more.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:10:45

'Well, so I'll give you one example. So I think one of the big sort of question marks has been sort of how, how wide is the aperture for the inputs that you're using to train the platforms, right? So for medical stuff, you know, is it, Hey, look, let's just widen the aperture completely. Let's look at every peer-reviewed journal. Sure. But also let's look every Reddit stream - Reddit thread that's coming through on this. Let's look at anecdotal case reports. Let's look at all these things that are happening around the world. So take it all in and make these platforms from a medical standpoint, reflect society or reflect the world, or there's a platform which I've used a lot called OpenEvidence, which is really, really streamlined in terms of what it's using to train itself. So it is all peer-reviewed journals and.

Audie Cornish

00:11:36

Right. 'Cause I've got to be honest, I don't think someone's Quora answers are going to help me solve anything. I have been on some, you know, let's just call them not very rigorous Yahoo! Answers. And I don't really want that in the sample set.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:11:52

'I think it's challenging. I agree with you. I think it's challenge. And, you know, especially when you're dealing with a discipline, like medicine and science, which is different than math and physics, for example, when you're talking about medicine and public health, it's not always 2+2=4, there's always some degree of uncertainty here. So, you know, part of the way that medical science moves forward is this constant challenging back and forth, and then hopefully you get to a better sort of answer. So that makes the case for some people to open the aperture as much as possible. Let's just look at what everybody is saying around these topics. Unfortunately, it's happening at a time when I think so much of medicine and public health is so politicized. So you're getting a lot of political sort of input into this as well.

Audie Cornish

00:12:38

'Yeah, well, I mean, you guys took a hit post-pandemic, like the medical community has lost its status as, the doctor says it, so it must be true.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:12:48

Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don't know what that means exactly to say it took a hit. I think that the idea is that if there's a lack of trust in things because things are politicized, do you push back on that or do you just accept this as the new sort of normal?

Audie Cornish

00:13:04

Well, that's what I mean by took a hit. I mean, right now, RFK Jr., it's like it, they, MAHA has a seat at the table. The vaccine skeptics, after years of being told, you're crackers, they have a seat at the table.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:13:18

Totally.

Audie Cornish

00:13:18

'And so it changes. If you rely on the thinking from the administration, it's not aligned with the settled science. You know what I'm mean? You're sitting there kind of being like, well, there's aluminum in this and is that a neurotoxin? And, like, now, you're sort of on their playing field about what are the facts that are known about any given thing. And please disagree with me. I'm just saying it's like-

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:13:39

I think the way that I would sort of contextualize that, though, is that I think there's a deeper desire to understand these things as opposed to sort of taking the expert's word for it I don't think mean that the outcome in terms of what would be recommended would change. So take aluminum, for example, you know, this idea that aluminum is used in vaccines as an adjuvant, which basically means if you didn't use an adjutant, you'd have to give a lot more of the vaccine to get the same immune response. This sort of accelerates it a bit. Oh, well, aluminum, that's problematic. That's a heavy metal. Why would you be doing that? But then if I also add into there that these children would absorb more aluminum into their bodies just in daily life through eating and drinking and living on planet Earth. Oh okay, well now you've contextualized that for me. That sort of context I think wasn't always there before. It was just like, hey, we've already thought about this, we've studied it, we've looked at this.

Audie Cornish

00:14:36

Yeah. Trust us.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:14:36

Yeah, and trust us in the sense that we also have children, we're also trying to do the best thing for our patients, all that sort of stuff. I don't think that in terms of taking a hit, I guess, if you use that term, that's what's changed. Is this desire to not just say the what, but the why behind this.

Audie Cornish

00:14:56

We're going to take a quick break. Back in a minute.

Audie Cornish

00:15:05

Clare, one of the interesting things that happened to Sanjay this year is he was the subject of a deepfake.

Clare Duffy

00:15:13

'Mm-hmm.

Audie Cornish

00:15:15

Of course, around a health ad, because everyone's always trying to sell you a supplement somewhere. Before, Sanjay, we get to your story. Clare, I find as a woman, I have no interest in going to look for deepfakes of myself. I feel like that will go to a place that I cannot cleanse my mental timeline of. Am I overthinking that?

Clare Duffy

00:15:36

No, not at all. I think that it has gotten really scary. I mean, it just, you don't even have to be a public figure. We're all out there. We're on TV. It's very easy for somebody to find a clip of us and in seconds make a deepfake photo, a deepfake video.

Audie Cornish

00:15:55

Was there a kid, was it a middle school kid who got in trouble with their school system because they created an image of a classmate, like a sexualized image?

Clare Duffy

00:16:01

We've seen a number of those instances where kids create deepfake sexualized images of other kids, of their teachers.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:16:09

Wow.

Clare Duffy

00:16:11

And because you don't even have to be a public person for this to happen to you, so many people have a photo on Instagram, on Snapchat, on YouTube. It doesn't take very much data now to create these very realistic looking deep fakes. And, you know, now we're even getting to a place with OpenAI Sora 2. Image generation model where you can create these videos and people can opt in to having their faces used by strangers. But you don't even have to opt in. Like there, it just is so easy and I think the challenge with AI is even if we see some of the bigger actors, the OpenAIs, the Googles, the Metas, require that people have consented to have their image used. It's kind of a game of the lowest common denominator.

Audie Cornish

00:16:55

Yeah.

Clare Duffy

00:16:55

So as soon as it's clear that this technology is possible, somebody is going to find a way to do it in a way that is harmful to people.

Audie Cornish

00:17:03

Sanjay, what was it like? Are you still weirded out?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:17:04

Well, I would say even more than harmful, it's nefarious and reprehensible, frankly. Yeah, I was weirded out. I mean, this has actually been happening for a little bit now where people will, before they were using AI video, people just using images and saying that me and others are selling these products and they would attribute certain statements to us that we never had made. And I think there was a part of me in the beginning who thought, okay, look, most people are going to see right through that. I had a really weird experience where I was walking down the street in Ann Arbor, Michigan with one of my daughters who goes to college there and I went to school there and a former professor of mine, someone who I really admire and he's in his early eighties now, but I know him well. So he knows, you know, like I would think this would not be a guy who would be faked out by a deepfake of me because he knows me. And you know, when you watch these videos, the voice is a little different, even the imagery is a little different. But he came up to me on the street, hadn't seen him in years, and he said, hey, just want to let you know, I bought some of those products you were talking about online. I'm really looking forward to it.

Audie Cornish

00:18:15

Oh.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:18:15

And I was like, my goodness, that's not me. That is not me, and and he just had this look on his face, and this is a very educated guy who knows me, who was totally taken in by this. So, that was a bit of a jarring moment. My parents' friends will call my parents sometimes and say, hey, you know, I'm really looking forward to trying these products. A lot of them, by the way, are around dementia. So they are preying on older people and presumably older people who are worried about their memory. These are reprehensible people. I don't even know what these products are. I can only pray that these are not products that will actually harm people. They're obviously taking their money, but I'm hoping that they don't end up buying something that could actually physically harm them.

Audie Cornish

00:19:00

Yeah. It's interesting to see all of these scams running around health, partnership, companionship. That's where we seem to be vulnerable, right? Like, I don't see a ton of AI like trying to break into banks, although I'm sure that's a thing.

Clare Duffy

00:19:14

That's going to be the thing of 2026, I think. I mean, I think we're going to, very quickly moving from a place where you can create a video like people create deepfake video like somebody created of Sanjay and put it on social media. And we're moving to a place where I could be on this call with you all. And it would actually be somebody else. And yet it looks and it sounds exactly like me in real time.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:19:37

Wow.

Clare Duffy

00:19:37

And I think that that is, you know, where the story is moving and whether that ends up targeting people because it looks like I'm calling my grandmother and I'm in trouble or it's a CEO who's calling their executive assistant saying, give me the password to our shared account. That's the sort of thing I think we're going to start to see in the coming year, unfortunately.

Audie Cornish

00:19:58

I don't think it's an accident, and Sanjay, I don't know if this has happened to you, but, like, I've heard my kids who are under the age of 10 say to one another, like, oh, that's fake, that's AI. And I'm like, have you even seen AI? Because we don't let them on the computer by themselves that much, and they really haven't. But it's that sense that they're aware...

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:20:16

Yes.

Audie Cornish

00:20:17

That this thing is not what it seems to be.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:20:21

Yes.

Audie Cornish

00:20:21

'Whereas I feel like coming up with the internet if you're sort of Millennial Gen-Xy and people told us, they're like, Facebook, it'll be great. You're going to make more friends. We were all like, yes, awesome, like, only good things could come from this. And this is coming in a moment where we're all more skeptical. Like, up and down the spectrum, people don't feel like tech companies have their best interests at heart and they don't necessarily believe in the utopias that they're describing.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:20:51

I completely agree with that. You know, I have three teenage girls. So this is conversation topic number one, almost every day. And one of the things that sort of strikes me, I think I mentioned this to Clare when we did the podcast together. My youngest daughter, she showed me this meme once on her phone. I don't remember, Snapchat or Instagram, whatever it was. And it was about John McCain. And I was very close to John McCain and it somehow suggested. It was supposed to be humorous, but it somehow suggested that he was actually alive, that he had never died. And because she knew that I was close to him, she was showing me this and, haha, dad, look at this, and blah, blah, and I said, okay, funny meme, but you know that's not true, right? And she's like, yeah, but, it's here on Snapchat or Instagram. I said right, but that's you know not true. And she said something to me which really stuck with me, which was, dad I don't think any of it's true. And it was this bizarre sort of moment where, you know, they look at these platforms as engaging, as entertaining, but as a platform of truth, I don't think the expectation is different. The expectation of truth is not there.

Audie Cornish

00:21:58

Yeah.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:21:58

The expectation of privacy is not there. And do they care about that? Like I care. Like, we all grew up with a platform truth. You may have disagreements, but at least you had the platform of truth. I just don't know what happens to a generation of kids that don't have that the way that we did.

Audie Cornish

00:22:14

I think they care a little. I mean, they're, like, buying vinyl and talking about holding books in their hands, and...

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:22:20

Yeah.

Audie Cornish

00:22:20

And, you know, one of the things you can say that's a high compliment to someone is "facts." You know what I mean?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:22:25

Yes, it's true.

Audie Cornish

00:22:25

Like, I feel like I'm actually wondering if we're going to move towards a period where there's a market of a human verified internet.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:22:34

Right.

Audie Cornish

00:22:34

Social media, news, where the main selling point is we can tell you for certain what you're seeing is real. And where can I go where there's a little watermark that's like this happened or there's some technology that sort of verifies that. I mean, maybe that's not a good business for the tech people, I don't know.

Clare Duffy

00:22:54

There are people that are working on it. I mean, I spoke with Kevin Rose, who was the founder of Digg, and he's trying to bring back that old social media platform with the selling point of saying, hey, everybody who is on this platform is going to be a verified human. We are going to verify you by making you talk to the camera or providing your credit card, but with the idea that people want to engage with other people and not with bots and not to have this uncertainty.

Audie Cornish

00:23:17

Yeah, because I'm on Reddit now. Are you back on Reddit?

Clare Duffy

00:23:20

A little bit.

Audie Cornish

00:23:21

After all these years, I've gotten back on Reddit because I'm like, at least these schmucks are probably real.

Clare Duffy

00:23:25

Other people.

Audie Cornish

00:23:26

Like, I can...you know, and the algorithm is not recommending things. I'm clicking and joining, and some of it's nostalgia, but some of is, like, I don't want everything fed to me.

Clare Duffy

00:23:38

Right. Well, and I think it's really important, too, because the experts who study this sort of information ecosystem talk about this phenomenon of reality apathy, where if nobody can trust if what they're seeing is real or fake, they do just sort of stop caring. And then what happens is you decide what's real and fake based on what aligns with your personal belief system. And it just sort of pulls people even more deeply into the rabbit holes that we've seen divide us in the last decade.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:24:06

Is the inflection, though, I'm curious Clare, is the inflection bots versus humans or is it just truth versus fiction? Because fiction can come from humans as well, you know, especially if you're trying to get clicks and monetize content.

Clare Duffy

00:24:19

I think it's both. I mean, I think people wanting a sense of authenticity, whether it's I'm seeing something that somebody who's a human is saying, even if what they're saying is wrong, or I'm not seeing something that's artificial. And I think to your point, Audie, people have this sense that they're being manipulated but don't quite know what to do about it. So it is going to be interesting to see how, you know, if there really is a market for this where people will demand enough control over their online experience. Yeah, I don't know. I don t know what the answer is but...

Audie Cornish

00:24:51

'Yeah, but to me I'm like, does someone want to give me the VC? Like, I'll I'll spend the money on it I want to verify. Um, hilarious point of order, semi-related but not related, is the other day when I was online and I think it was Reddit, somebody made a comment about how the algorithm had fed them something but they called it the "Al Gore's rhythm." And I just I just thought that was great. Someone else has to hear that happened.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:25:19

They were probably dictating and they got it wrong.

Audie Cornish

00:25:19

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so enough about Al Gore's rhythm. We're going to touch grass for a minute. What's something that happened this year, or even is the seasons approaching, is that, you know, you're thinking about that is not online.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:25:39

Hmm. What is not online?

Audie Cornish

00:25:39

Yeah, we're all like, what do you mean?

Clare Duffy

00:25:41

What does that mean?

Audie Cornish

00:25:42

What do you need? You want me to go first?

Clare Duffy

00:25:45

Yes.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:25:46

Yeah, give us an example.

Audie Cornish

00:25:47

'You know, I think that I have been surprised at returning to like, church life. Like, returning to community. We talked about this on the last show for The Assignment. There's this movement of people who are like more Catholic or more Orthodox or, you know, a lot of people who were surprised and dismayed by the anti-Semitism in the culture have started going back to synagogue. And I have found in my own life, our church is packed. Like, kids. Like, families. Like, people. They were having two baptisms a week. And I actually wonder if it's part of that world of people who are like, offline. I want to shake hands with someone. I want to see someone else's baby. I want to, like, just get away from it, right? They're not all coming out of religious zealotry. I think they're also coming for community.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:26:43

I think along that vein, just sort of building on what you were even talking about earlier, I think so much of the conversation around healthcare and medicine has been the MAHA sort of movement, you know, 90% plus of how people think about that has been dictated by that. And yet, there are so many amazing things that are happening in the world of science and medicine with regard to treatment of dementia, for example, and wonderful sort progress that is made, which I think sometimes it's online in small sectors of society. Certainly, I follow this stuff online. I have regular communications with people who are experts in this area or things that I'm working on, but the public doesn't hear about it as much unless they seek it out because if you turn on the news or you're on Reddit or whatever, you're probably mostly hearing a sort of politicized version of medicine and science.

Audie Cornish

00:27:37

Yeah, because we're prone to conflict, like we're conflict hunters.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:27:40

Yeah.

Audie Cornish

00:27:40

As journalists, right? And so sometimes you don't follow the innovations as closely because you're busy being like, oh the stakes are really high we've got to cover this thing

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:27:51

Yeah, and I think it's too bad sometimes, because there are some wonderful things that are happening as well that are really inspiring and may make all of our lives better. I mean, dementia, which is something I care about just because I'm a brain guy, but what I learn is that if you're over the age of 55 in this country and you say, what are your top health concerns? For most people, dementia is right at the top of the list, either for themselves or for their parents or whoever it might be. And I think there's this sense for a long time, it's just preordained. Either you're going to get dementia or you're not. And there's nothing you can do about it. Kind of the way that we used to think about heart disease 50, 60 years ago. That's changing. And yet, you know, not enough people sort of know about it because the allure is towards.

Audie Cornish

00:28:35

Yeah.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:28:36

You know, looking at the politicized medical public health stuff.

Clare Duffy

00:28:41

This is a very literal interpretation of this question.

Audie Cornish

00:28:43

Yes.

Clare Duffy

00:28:43

'But one of the things that I've really loved seeing this year is there's this movement of teenagers who are communally sort of coming together to not reject technology entirely, but take intentional breaks or sort of downgrade their technology use. We're seeing teens, including here in New York, there's a group called the Luddite Club that, many of them have chosen to opt for flip phones instead of smartphones, or they come together on the weekends and they just spend time phone-free for a few hours where they go to the library and read or they crochet, they do art. They're also organizing these "delete days" where they all decide, you can pick which one you want, but they all decided to delete an app off of their phone. And I think it's really cool to see not just that they're deciding to take this intentional action to lessen the influence of technology in their lives, again, sort of, in this vein of realizing that they've been manipulated by these companies, their data is being used by these companies for profit, but also doing so in a way that brings them together for real life community, I think that's really cool.

Audie Cornish

00:29:53

Well, they also seem to understand the codependency of it, right?

Clare Duffy

00:29:56

Right.

Audie Cornish

00:29:56

Part of the whole problem of having the phone in the teen years is like, if everyone's on it but me..

Clare Duffy

00:30:02

FOMO.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:30:02

Right.

00:30:02

Like that loneliness is intense. So I like that they both diagnosed the problem and then like accurately found a remedy, which is I don't want to be alone. I don't want to be the only person taking this stand.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:30:17

'Right. That makes me optimistic to hear that, because I think ultimately all these problems that we're talking about, we are saddling the next generation with them and they are, you're starting to see glimmers of this. You know, my kids, they would do this summer camp, where as part of the summer camp they could not have their devices. And it would be a few weeks and they would come back and they were happy. And you'd have a conversation over the dinner table and they'd look you in the eyes, you'd know. We never allowed phones at the dinner table, but you could sense that their energy was somewhere else. And I remember talking to one of my daughters about that and just sort of highlighting this. Look how you feel when you've been off your device for three weeks. And she made this comment to me and she says, you know, part of the reason we weren't on those devices is because we were in this really, really intense social atmosphere. We're all camp. We're together. Social media for them is trying to, at least for my daughters, I don't want overextend this argument. Social media is to to get the social part of it. And I think in an increasingly isolated world that's where they gravitated toward that should not be a surprise, but when they can have these really intense in-person social experiences, the desire for online social media goes down and and they didn't seem to miss it.

Audie Cornish

00:31:36

Well, Clare, I want to thank you for ending on a high note. I did not expect that to come from Terms of Service, to be frank, not saying the pod is dark, but it has its moments.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:31:52

I love the pod. It's awesome, I love listening to it.

Audie Cornish

00:31:53

I told you he was the nice one.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:31:55

No, I'm truly inspired by it.

Audie Cornish

00:31:57

No, it's hard to tackle this stuff. So I appreciate the both of you. And yeah, Sanjay, I feel like you've been on the like between Ozempic and AI and this and that. It just feels like the world of health and like consumer thinking around health. It's just been a time. 2025 was a lot.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:32:16

Yeah, no end in sight either. I think it's just coming. We're constantly, you know, we are constantly at it.

Audie Cornish

00:32:23

Well, I appreciate both of you. I hope everyone checks out the pods and thanks guys. Thanks for being with us.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:32:29

Thanks, Audie.

Clare Duffy

00:32:30

Thank you.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:32:30

You're the best. Appreciate it.