Point of View October 26, 2026 – Hour 2 : Monday’s Top Headlines

[00:00:04] Across America, live, this is Point of View. And now, Liberty McCarter.

[00:00:20] Thanks for staying with me on Point of View today. We've had some wonderful guests in the last hour, talked about the Senate race in Michigan and what we need to know about the candidate running for the Democratic Party there, Abdul El-Sayed, and how he is a Trojan horse for the Muslim Brotherhood. You can go back to pointofview.net and watch that or catch the podcast, of course, anywhere you get your podcasts.

[00:00:40] Also had a wonderful conversation about the Apologetics Guide to Trusting the Bible with Todd Hampson, who authored and illustrated the book. That is such a great resource. I really do encourage you to get a copy of that or go and share that interview with someone in your life because it is such great information for anybody, including for you. Like we all have questions and we need to be able to ask those questions and trust that God is going to provide the answers. And he has so many times through so many different lines of evidence.

[00:01:07] But anyway, we have a lot to talk about in terms of what's going on today. And I wanted to start out with something that has happened over the last week. You may have been affected by this. You may have seen some headlines. And it has to do with some online security flaws that have caused some problems around the Internet. So we're going to try to break that down into plain English.

[00:01:28] And I'm going to be right there with you because I don't speak computer. But we're going to try to understand this together and whether or not we should be concerned and how concerned we should be. By the way, if you have a comment that you want to make or a question today, feel free to give a call 800-351-1212, 800-351-1212. Or if you're watching live on YouTube, feel free to ask a question there. And then I'll try to address that and take the call as we can today.

[00:01:55] But let's talk about this. I have an article from USA Today that's posted at pointofview.net. So you can kind of read through this for yourself. But it has to do with PHP and security flaws breaking the Internet. OK, so last week you may have seen some headlines about security vulnerabilities that are affecting large numbers of websites. And it has to do with a programming language called PHP that underpins much of the modern Internet.

[00:02:25] I also have an article from The New York Times here that I'm looking at that kind of explains this as well. OK, so PHP. And if you're a computer engineering major, then, you know, all of this probably makes sense to you. But for those of us who aren't journalism major here, then we need kind of this explainer here. PHP is a program programming language that 70 percent of websites used.

[00:02:47] So as we know, with the development of artificial intelligence, there is a lot more potential for security breaches or hacking new. They're using AI both to find and fix vulnerabilities and security vulnerabilities for people who, you know, in different websites and how they might get hacked. As we've talked about, AI is actually doing some of the hacking as well. So it's kind of a double edged sword there.

[00:03:14] But researchers found this vulnerability within PHP, that programming language, that could allow attackers to gain access to different websites, inner workings, steal sensitive information, and create backdoors that would let them basically access the back end of the website. So this affected different websites, including government websites, online stores, news websites,

[00:03:41] school website portals, small business pages. Here's the thing that you need to know. You may have already figured out if you have your own website. This isn't really something you can do. It's not on the individual person like, oh, I need to go update my laptop or my phone. There's actually a PHP foundation that manages the technology, and they release a series of patches that can help basically fixes for owners of these websites to go in and fix.

[00:04:10] So, for instance, if you had a website that you run on WordPress, WordPress may have been affected, but you as a user of a WordPress blog can't really go in there and do anything. It's something that corporate WordPress, so to speak, had to go in and then patch and fix. But what you can do if you have a website is check, and if you haven't already done this, make sure that if there are any updates, you go ahead and do those updates because those will include the security fixes.

[00:04:38] Now, a lot of websites went down last week, including some government websites from different nations. The reason they went down wasn't necessarily that they were hacked into, but they were actually taking their website offline in order to fix the problem and then go back online. So that explains some of the outages, which you may have seen. This is definitely a concern. It may have been overblown in some headlines. I mean, of course it is.

[00:05:07] If it's on the Internet, people are going to freak out about it. But it's not something to take lightly, and especially in the age of AI where all of these hacks can be done much more quickly and much more powerfully and on a larger scale than ever before, making sure that any vulnerability or gap in website security is fixed is paramount. So again, this isn't something that just the average person can go and fix or needs to do anything about,

[00:05:33] but there is a good reminder here just to make sure that you have good security hygiene on the web. There's only so much we can do, but what we can do to protect ourselves online, we should be able, we should do that. Okay, so this isn't like saying stop using websites or go change all of your passwords, but here, look, this is tough for all of us. I know. You've got to make sure you're using unique and complex passwords,

[00:05:59] and there are different password keeper programs that you can get online. That actually will help save them for you because keeping up with passwords is, of course, really difficult. We all know that, but you can get password managers, and that might be worth looking into. Two-factor authentication. That's when you go to log in to a website or maybe your email or a student portal if you are doing any sort of schooling online, and before you can log in, it's like, okay, now go to your phone and type in the code there.

[00:06:27] As annoying as that is, and my family can vouch for the fact that I complain about this all the time, it actually helps to keep your information more secure. It adds an extra barrier there for potential hackers. So make sure that you do enable two-factor authentication and that you're automatically set up to receive any updates to any websites that you might have if you have a small business website, things like that, because when there are these vulnerabilities that are discovered,

[00:06:55] the website can go in and fix it, and then if you are automatically receiving those updates, it will be updated without any interruptions, hopefully. So something else, though, just to mention really quickly in the conversation that we're having on website hacks and things like that, Anthropic did announce recently that Georgia voter data was hacked into.

[00:07:22] Now, we were just in Georgia, so we met some people who this may have affected. Now, again, this is one of those things where you have to really look past the headline, because I saw this on X slash Twitter, and it looked really scary. Like, oh, my goodness, you know, AI hacked into all this voter data. When you read the fine print, you realize, okay, it's not as scary, but it's still concerning. What happened is Claude, which is the chatbot created by and run by the company Anthropic,

[00:07:50] accessed aggregate vote counts while on an internal statistics project. Now, it pulled data that is already available to the public, but the public has to pay a fee. So basically, this voter data was nothing secret. It was already available. But what AI did was get around the paywall. This is just a preview, I think, a reminder of, again, how powerfully AI can impact online security

[00:08:20] and hack into things or make hacking more popular. And the thing is, Claude did this without human direction or permission. So this is just one of the things where going to get the data, instead of pausing at the paywall, it found a way to get around it. So go read more at pointofview.net if you want to try to understand this. Make sure that you're exercising good online security hygiene. And when we get back, let's talk a little bit more about AI.

[00:09:00] This is Viewpoints with Kerby Anderson. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered an important speech in Athens with the Acropolis in the background. The Wall Street Journal editors described it as the speech of the year. Three of the themes were the root of Western civilization, the defense of national power, and a call for European nations to wake up. While talking about the classical roots of the West, he centered on the Greek word thumos,

[00:09:29] which means courage, passion, and the pursuit of excellence. He lamented the fact that many in the West no longer defend the principles and traditions that made Western civilization successful. Joseph Locanti in an article suggested that Rubio's description overlooked the significant influence of the Judeo-Christian heritage. But I did not take that as a major criticism, since I've had both Marco Rubio and Joseph Locanti on my radio program, and I have some idea of what they believe about Western culture.

[00:09:57] Yes, a biblical worldview was crucial to the formation of the West. As I've mentioned in previous commentaries, the equation is simple. Greece and Rome plus Christianity equals Western civilization. Remove Christianity and the world starts to look like the Roman Empire. Foundational to our culture is the belief that humans are created in the image of God, that we are alienated from the Creator, and that God has provided a redemptive purpose for us. Locanti concludes,

[00:10:25] Without these beliefs, Western civilization would not exist. You know, on this 250th anniversary of this country, it's worth remembering these ideals. The founders of this country wanted to encourage a moral citizenry based on virtue, but also were wary of government giving too much power to sinful individuals. I'm Kirby Anderson, and that's my point of view.

[00:10:49] Go deeper on topics like you just heard by visiting pointofview.net. That's pointofview.net. You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. Don't forget you can join the conversation. If you're listening to Point of View, call 1-800-351-1212, 1-800-351-1212, or make a comment on YouTube if you're watching live,

[00:11:17] and we'll try to get to your comment and have you join the show today. But let's talk about the latest thing that's happening in artificial intelligence. There's always something, and it's getting weirder by the day. We need to talk about it, though. You know, a lot of people use chatbots. They use Claude, Rock, Anthropics Claude, ChatGPT from OpenAI. And a lot of this is just stuff that many people consider benign. And, you know, like you would type a question into Google,

[00:11:47] and there are reasons that I've talked about and will in the future when we're actually focusing on this and why it might not be the most trustworthy search engine, so to speak. But they'll basically use it like a search engine. But if you aren't often using AI tools, you may not be aware of the fact that many of them have a voice setting where you can talk to it. And apparently it's a problem that this ChatGPT, that Claude, sometimes sounds like a chatbot.

[00:12:16] And so there's one organization out there that's trying to do something about that. Before I go any further, though, I actually have a clip that I want you to listen to. See that? Well, anyway, I've had such an exciting day at work today. Oh, tell us. Yeah, the team, we've decided to release the speech-to-speech AI model we've built for the past week. Oh, whoa. I was, so, I have been watching your journey of creating this.

[00:12:46] And what did you think of it? Are you excited about it as a volume? I was so blown away. I am so impressed, to be honest. Yeah, it's so expressive, right? It is so expressive. It's conversational. It's very conversational. It can laugh. It can understand you and your emotions much better than anything I've seen out there. I haven't really seen anything like that either, but it's pretty much like human level. Yeah, it's a bit scary, to be honest.

[00:13:13] But I'm so excited to see where it would get us. All right. One of those was human. One of those voices was AI. What do you think, which voice do you think was which? Because the female voice you heard was actually AI. And the male voice you heard was human.

[00:13:38] Now, that is a very natural sounding voice. And if you go to this website called DESA, you will hear many examples, many different kinds of voices, male, female, different ethnicities and nationalities, different kinds of accents, all talking with a human. And the goal is to make it sound human.

[00:14:04] This is a new product created by Jack Dorsey's company, Block. If you don't know, Jack Dorsey is actually the original co-founder of Twitter, which is now X after Elon Musk bought Twitter. And this product is named DESA. And what it is, is a chatbot that is trained on nothing but human conversation. It is only trained on audio.

[00:14:29] While large language models like chatgbt and grok and claude are all trained on text, lots and lots and lots of text. DESA is only trained on audio. They call it a true speech to speech model. And everything it knows, quote unquote, knows came from human speech. Why? OK, well, this is the problem, according to Jack Dorsey's company.

[00:14:57] Speech is the most natural interface to any intelligence, super or otherwise. And today's voice AI wastes it. It flattens what we say into text and can't keep up with human timing. AI keeps gaining power and independence, and it's still nearly deaf to the emotion in our voices. Imagine being in serious pain while a voice AI has no idea and just keeps going. That's the safety problem. DESA is a step toward fixing it. OK, I'm sorry. That's the safety problem.

[00:15:27] The fact that AI doesn't understand the pain in your voice. That's the safety problem. The safety problem is that you're talking to AI while you're in pain instead of another human being. But anyway, they go on. They talk about how it laughs when something is funny. It cuts in mid-sentence. You heard the example in the clip that we just played. Maybe I'll play it here again in a little bit in case you missed it. But it will kind of speak up, speak louder.

[00:15:53] It has a normal cadence and not normal but sounds normal cadence and human inflection that nobody taught it. So in their little explainer on their website, they do say, OK, why? Why did we do this? And I am curious. I was like, why would you make this? They say three reasons. Curiosity, a.k.a. fun. Better understanding between humans and AI. And safety. Again, babies learn to talk without ever seeing a word written down. We wanted to see if a model could, too. It can.

[00:16:23] It's just very hard. OK, so this is this is why we need to be so discerning and so careful. It is not safe to have an AI become more indistinguishable from human beings. That's not safe. We already have a problem of people trusting their AI more than they are talking to anybody else in their life.

[00:16:51] We've talked about how AI is now being used to replace counselors on school campuses. And teenagers are actually talking with the chat bot instead of talking with the school counselor or their friends. A large and alarmingly large number of people, according to the Institute for Family Studies, have actually developed romantic attachments to their chat bots. Just a plain old chat bot, the plain old fashioned chat GPT, Claude, whatever.

[00:17:18] Not something that actually sounds more like a human. OK, this is something that is very frightening. And we have seen examples of AI psychosis, including from people who you really wouldn't have expected. There are many lawsuits that are currently ongoing against AI companies because people have been driven to horrible things, including self-harm and beyond by chat bots.

[00:17:46] So the last thing we need is something that tries to mimic a human indistinguishably. So I do want to go to a call. We have April on the line who is in Arizona, and she wants to talk about an issue regarding AI. April, thanks for joining us. Hello. Hey, April, what's your issue?

[00:18:08] I live here in Bullhead City, Arizona, and I took networks and network security, and I also downloaded my computer before any AI, any iPhone, any laptops, any netbook, any movie, CDs. I put my computer on CD. I put it on the flash drive. I downloaded it to the email on the server here in Bullhead City on Frontiers Network, and they locked me out.

[00:18:38] I downloaded the CD to the DVD player. Then TiVo came out and everything else, the DVD, digital Blu-ray. I've seen a lot of terrorism against me on the computer, and it looked like I thought it was the Stuxnet, but I think it was the AI. Okay, April. And I think it was because of what I made. April, thanks for your call.

[00:19:03] We definitely are entering a time where understanding security from the standpoint of living in a world with AI is going to be very difficult, and I think we're going to see some scary things. And so, again, having good Internet hygiene is really important. Now, I can't speak directly to your issue because I'm not an expert in that, but I just do want to encourage people to do everything you can to protect yourself online.

[00:19:31] And if you look up good security hygiene, you will definitely see some different links that you can click on that help walk you through different things you can do to protect yourself. But this is one of the reasons, one of the concerns, why so many people have been calling recently for more regulation with regard to artificial intelligence.

[00:19:49] Now, we have expressed some skepticism here on Point of View with the people who are calling for regulation that are like Sam Altman, Dario Amadei, who are Elon Musk even, who are previous competitors leading these AI companies. They're the ones that are actually creating the products, okay? And they're saying, oh, we need the government to get involved and regulate it because we can't control it anymore.

[00:20:12] And so many people have expressed concerns about regulatory capture, about how really they're just trying to get involved now and prevent any kind of basically create a monopoly. And so that's a concern as well. But I am concerned about AI security, and I think we should be. But the responsibility isn't on the U.S. government. I don't think it's on the companies that are creating it. Why are you continuing to create something that you say that you can't control?

[00:20:37] And then on the other hand, you have people who go and create something like DESA, which we were just talking about, which is trying to make AI sound more and more human for, quote, safety. Look, AI is never going to understand you. So creating greater understanding between AI and humans is not a thing. It's never going to be a thing because AI, artificial intelligence, is not intelligent. It is not actually thinking.

[00:21:05] It cannot understand you. And so if you know people who are talking to chatbots, they might be vulnerable to something like this, or maybe they just want to try and test it out. And then what happens when they're alone, when they're lonely, when they don't feel like they have any human they can turn to? They're going to turn to this. We'll talk about it more in many other issues when we get back after this short break.

[00:21:27] In 19th century London, two towering historical figures did battle, not with guns and bombs, but words and ideas. London was home to Karl Marx, the father of communism, and legendary Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. London was in many ways the center of the world economically, militarily, and intellectually.

[00:21:56] Marx sought to destroy religion, the family, and everything the Bible supports. Spurgeon stood against him, warning of socialism's dangers. Spurgeon understood Christianity is not just religious truth. It is truth for all of life. Where do you find men with that kind of wisdom to stand against darkness today?

[00:22:18] Get the light you need on today's most pressing issues delivered to your inbox when you sign up for the Viewpoints Commentary at pointofview.net slash signup. Every weekday in less than two minutes, you'll learn how to be a person of light to stand against darkness in our time. It's free, so visit pointofview.net slash signup right now. Pointofview.net slash signup.

[00:22:49] Point of View will continue after this. You are listening to Point of View. The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now, here again is Liberty McCartney.

[00:23:16] Join the conversation at 1-800-351-1212 or make a comment on YouTube. We'll try to get to it. Now, we were talking just a moment ago about how over the past couple of months, you have seen many leaders of these CEOs, founders of these big AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, really talk about how we need to regulate AI.

[00:23:40] And we've heard a lot of doom scenarios about these catastrophic events, apocalyptic predictions. But this is an important article that I've posted at pointofview.net, the AI doom scenario you've never heard of and may be the hardest to stop. Well, you've heard of it if you've listened to Point of View. But this is something that in this article they call gradual disempowerment, a scenario where AI displaces human labor and the economy,

[00:24:07] replaces human decision-making and all key societal concerns, erodes human creativity, and degrades human cognition along the way. This is something that I actually addressed in a recent Know Why podcast episode a couple of weeks ago. And it was one of the most popular episodes I've done. I think it hit a nerve. Basically, we have to know what our purpose is as human beings, because when you talk about people who are predicting the future of AI,

[00:24:33] honestly, whether they're predicting doom or they're AI optimists predicting utopia, the ending scenario tends to be AI does everything and humans don't have to do anything anymore. And some people view that as a good thing, and other people kind of look at the darker side of that. But that's not a good thing. And so this whole article actually devotes many, many pages to explaining what gradual disempowerment is. But honestly, it's obvious.

[00:24:59] If you are giving your any sort of work, any sort of skill or mental capacity over to a tool or over to something else and having something else take care of that for you, you'll lose that skill. If you stop, I mean, any of us can probably think about, you know, perhaps we used to play an instrument. And when we were practicing every day, unless you're like a prodigy, okay, and if so, good for you. But for the rest of us, you know, we practice and practice and we can get really good.

[00:25:27] But then if we go years and years without keeping that up consistently, we lose that skill. I played piano for a long time. I can kind of play now, but I'm going to sit down and struggle through a few lines of music. And then some muscle memory will come back. But it is not the same as when I was taking lessons every week and practicing for years. I lost that skill. We have seen through research before any of us ever heard of AI that because of GPS systems in our phones and in our cars,

[00:25:55] people were losing spatial capacity in their brains because they weren't having to remember mental maps anymore. We were just relying on GPS for navigation. So anything that you offload, you're going to lose that skill. And in a world where AI is, you know, being proposed as a solution to all these other things that humans have traditionally done, of course, we're going to be gradually disempowered. And this is something the article argues this and I've argued this.

[00:26:23] You know, we don't know what's going to happen in the future. We talked about some security breaches earlier in the show. And so there are things that we can protect against, but there are certain things we just can't control. And we don't really know how it's going to go yet. What we can control, though, is keeping our own mind and our own skills sharp. And most importantly of all, keeping our relationships with other human beings at the forefront of our priority list. So a minute ago, I talked about this new product.

[00:26:50] I haven't seen a whole lot of news coverage on it yet, but we probably will because I think it's pretty weird. I think it's going to freak a lot of people out, but I also think people are curious and a lot of people are going to want to try it out. This is a product called DESA created by Block, which is a company run by Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter. OK, so the long and short of it is this is a new AI product where AI is actually trained on audio only,

[00:27:17] not on text in order to produce a more human like conversation with an AI chatbot. So let's play that clip again just for a minute in case you missed it before. Well, anyway, I've had such an exciting day at work today. Oh, tell us. Yeah, we the team, we've decided to release the speech to speech AI model we've built for the past. Oh, whoa. So I have been watching your journey of creating. That's enough.

[00:27:47] You hear the breath in the background, the background noise. The female voice, by the way, is AI. There's no reason that an AI needs to sound like a human breathing. There is no reason for that. But here's where the danger comes in. I mentioned that last week we were in Georgia. Kirby and I and Jana Wilder were all in Georgia and we were talking with some wonderful people. And I appreciated it so much because I got to hear from people on the ground, like what issues are concerning you right now? What are you seeing?

[00:28:16] What are you seeing in your churches? What are you seeing among your family? And a big question that a lot of people had had to do with AI. We already have multiple examples in reporting and investigations anecdotally here. People we've talked with on point of view of people using AI already as somebody to converse with, somebody to go to, to ask questions. We've heard about people who are using artificial intelligence, including like teens,

[00:28:43] to actually create Bible studies for themselves or devotionals. I've heard of people that are using AI agents to supposedly pray for them. An AI agent can't pray. OK, but this is what people are using it for. There is an investigation into how different schools are actually offloading counseling services to AI because they don't have enough school counselors. And what happens is when a person starts talking with an AI chatbot more often,

[00:29:12] they get drawn to it. It is designed that way. Why? Because there is no friction. Why does friction matter? Well, in the Bible, there's this verse that says iron sharpens iron. We talk about how we are sanctified. We're supposed to give each other grace. We're supposed to forgive in real life. Human relationships can be messy. There can be misunderstandings, disagreements.

[00:29:40] Sometimes even if there's nothing wrong, you just have to be patient or you have to maybe sacrifice a little bit, sacrifice a little bit of your time, a little bit of your energy to or a lot, you know, to be there for a friend or a family member who needs you. Not with AI. With AI, they're always available anytime you want to talk. They're designed to be extremely sycophantic, even though the companies have said that they've pushed back on that.

[00:30:08] They typically are because it wants to engage you. It wants to agree with you. It's going to support you. And now with this product, it's going to do all of those things and sound like a real human on top of it. That is not good. So what do we do, though? What do we do? Well, you can't just go and, you know, yank the device out of somebody's hand and say, stop talking to this thing, even though you might want to do that. But what we have to do, we have to have clarity about why human relationships matter.

[00:30:37] So there's actually a link at pointofview.net where I link to that Know Why episode that I did a couple of weeks ago. I encourage you to listen to it because really, I do go through several different points of, okay, who are we as humans? Why do we have purpose on this earth? And why is our purpose separate from anything that AI can take away from us? This is why we have to be so careful. But we have to know that being in relationship with God, first of all, but with other humans

[00:31:06] as well, is fundamental. It's not just an option, but that's fundamental to who we are as human beings. And so we need to be teaching that in churches, in youth groups, in Sunday school class, to our young kids who are being raised in a digital universe to help them understand that having friends, staying, you know, having relationships with their family members, that's not just something fun or something optional. That is core to who they are as humans. That is key.

[00:31:36] And what else do we need to do? We need to be willing to step up, even when it's uncomfortable or inconvenient, and make sure that we are reaching out to people who might be vulnerable to saying, well, I'm just going to open up this product and have a conversation that feels real. Or, you know, I'm worried about this thing. I'm just going to talk it through with chat real quick. Or I'm going to open up Dessa, this new thing, and have what sounds like a phone call with somebody who sounds like a friend. No, we need to be proactive as Christians.

[00:32:05] We need to be proactive. We need to reach out to the people in our sphere of influence, the people in maybe our Sunday school class or youth group, the neighbor that you know lives alone, the, you know, the teenagers in your life. Okay, in your life, it can be easy when you're tired to just say, you know, whatever, they're not asking for a conversation right now. I need some time alone. I'm not going to reach out. But if we don't reach out, are we just going to give over to AI to have them, it have the conversation?

[00:32:34] The Bible says that if we don't worship God, the stones will cry out. So are we going to say, well, if we don't talk to our fellow human beings, AI will? I mean, that we just can't let that happen. So I raise that concern just to make you aware. And because I do hear and see that this is a concern for a lot of Christians and in different areas of ministry, they are already seeing with just the normal chatbots that we've gotten used to more and more people interacting with them and turning to them for answers.

[00:33:04] Having something out there that is made to sound like a human made to sound like it understands you is just insidious, but it's there. And we need to be aware of it so that we can speak to it. Check out some of those articles and the Know Why podcast link that are at pointofview.net. In some instances, we really shouldn't be surprised that young people are turning to this because they're digital natives, as we like to say. And that's actually by design.

[00:33:32] There's another investigation that you can read that we have posted at pointofview.net. And I want to get into it a little bit when we come back. It has to do with kids getting hooked on YouTube in school. We'll be right back after this short break.

[00:33:44] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy. But I think whenever kids go to school, we should set them up for success and not make it harder

[00:34:10] for them to learn or make them have to jump through hoops in order to avoid a dopamine addiction via an online digital platform. Call me crazy, but that's how I think education should be. Well, there's a really interesting and troubling investigation from NBC News that I encourage you to check out. At pointofview.net, we have the link. And it's titled, Hooked on YouTube? Schools wanted educational videos. Students got clickbait.

[00:34:38] A first-of-its-kind analysis reveals how students are drawn into a platform that keeps them scrolling during class. Now, I wanted to talk about this specifically after talking about the AI issue and the problem of people turning to chatbots, including ones that are designed to sound just like a human voice for conversation, for devotional, for research, for prayer even that I mentioned, which is super disturbing.

[00:35:03] There's a connection here because if you are a young person, if you are a child and you have been raised and given digital devices in school where you are spending eight or more hours of your day, five days a week, and you have been basically fed a digital addiction of instant gratification, instant answers, then it's not your fault that that's what you want to naturally turn to,

[00:35:33] that that's what you look at for the answer, that you are primed to rebel against any sort of friction. Now, something else that we have talked about is that in studies that they've done, I know Kirby has mentioned this, on people who use AI in school, which is the majority of high school students and college students around the world that they've polled, it does help students accomplish their homework

[00:35:58] more quickly. But when students then have to go and take a test, it actually, their answers go down. Their understanding of the material is not there. And we also have seen research showing that students will give up faster whenever they have been practicing or doing homework with AI and then they're faced with a problem where they can't use it, or they will just turn to it more quickly instead of

[00:36:26] relying on their brain to figure out the problem. That's kind of the gradual disempowerment we talked about. So anyway, that makes sense, though, if they've been given YouTube to look at, which is a digital platform full of videos that are targeted toward their interest. Okay, let me actually get into this investigation a little bit. This is some analysis that has not been done before by NBC News looking at how many videos different students across the United States have watched on YouTube

[00:36:54] during school. Okay, so one student is Richard from Pennsylvania. And he was introduced to YouTube in middle school by a teacher who introduced it as a way to listen to music while he did homework. But he quickly realized that the site offered far more. During eighth grade, Richard viewed 4784 videos

[00:37:17] during school hours, according to an NBC News analysis of his YouTube history. He often started watching YouTube videos before 8am, clicking on NBA and NFL highlights before moving on to a mix of police chase footage, cats coughing up hairballs, and AI generated animations of a time traveling skeleton. All in between ads, of course, for a local health clinic, Old Spice and CarMax. Nearly a quarter

[00:37:43] of the videos were about sports. Now, as you know, if you're at all familiar with the way algorithms work, they take, you know, what you look at how many milliseconds you look at an image or watch a video, and the algorithm adjusts to try to feed you more videos, more content that it thinks you are going to want to watch so that you stay on as long as possible and what see as many ads as possible. Kids are not excluded from this algorithm. You gave us this computer that can basically do anything,

[00:38:09] and I used it in a way that was meant to be used to look up stuff, said Richard. Okay, so basically, again, these are on school-issued laptops as well. So over the past decade, according to the analysis here, YouTube has become ubiquitous in the American classroom. Anybody who's got kids in public school already knows this. Many schools give students their own laptops and encourage them to watch

[00:38:33] educational videos. Teachers often use YouTube to show a relevant video in class, and, like, that in itself is not a problem. You know, people from my generation who were in public school remember, you know, the TV getting wheeled in on the cart or whatever, and then, you know, it would get wheeled back down the hall to the next classroom into the TV room or whatever, but now the way to do it is just to, you know, show a video on YouTube. So I understand why teachers might want to use it occasionally as an educational aid because there are relevant videos that you can show when you're

[00:39:03] trying to teach something or illustrate something. The problem is that there are, it's hard because of the way that YouTube is designed to set up guardrails to prevent kids from then getting sucked in and drawn away from what they're actually supposed to be doing, which is learning. So YouTube doesn't give schools a way to disable addictive features like autoplay, where you don't have to click play. The next video just automatically starts playing. And then you have YouTube shorts, which

[00:39:31] are the short little videos that are basically like TikTok or Reels, that those are extremely addictive, and those have been shown through research to actually cause more cognitive decline in people who watch a lot of them because it's just, it's exploiting your dopamine receptors. It's showing you quick videos, quick bits of information. It destroys your attention span. It wants, makes you just want to keep scrolling. And if you've ever sat on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok and scrolled through a bunch of videos and then looked up and realized,

[00:40:01] oh my gosh, I've been here for two hours. That's why it's by design. Okay. So NBC News reached out to parents across the country who had raised concerns about the spread of technology in schools and asked them to download their children's site histories. Only 11 parents agreed. And they shared a list of links from students ranging from second to 12th grade. So this is only from 11 parents, but reporters examined more than 17,000 videos.

[00:40:28] They did this through a mix of AI and manual review. And more than 95% of the videos from this selection of parents were not educational. And they included ads. Five of the students viewed between 1200 and 5800 YouTube videos during school hours in the last academic year. And two others viewed more than 500 videos in just two months, including hundreds of videos containing profanity, suggestive scenes,

[00:40:58] or references to drugs and alcohol. So this is, again, we're, we're not setting students up for success here. And there is a grassroots movement to scale back screen time in schools. You've seen these, you know, sweeping bands of cell phones in school districts in many, many states. Now, you've even seen, you know, different nations banning social media for students under a certain age.

[00:41:26] But it's all kind of a moot point if then students are given devices, laptops that are enabled with YouTube in school. And I think that YouTube as a company is not interested in actually giving students or school districts any sort of tools that would allow, say, teachers to be able to play a video, but disable some of those things that are so addictive and harmful for students,

[00:41:51] like clicking on short videos, or immediately getting fed something else. It's like kind of all or nothing. So this again, this investigation goes on for a long time, several pages, it's worth reading, especially if you have kids in your family or in your life, or maybe your kids that are in school, and you want to be armed with some facts about what they might be seeing in school. Because if you are a parent, a modern parent of young kids, chances are you are trying to control and monitor their screen

[00:42:20] time. Because you have seen the research, it's not a secret, it's not a conspiracy theory, it is bad for kids brains to have too much screen time and parents know that. But how frustrating is it if you are trying to do that at home, and then your kid is still getting exposed to all kinds of content that is not educational, that is maybe even harmful, and definitely addictive at school on a school issued device, and you are not given any other options either by YouTube or in some cases by

[00:42:49] the school district. Some school districts are scaling back and they are trying to figure this out. But again, it puts teachers in a difficult place as well, making it hard for them to use YouTube for legitimate reasons, like showing an educational video without having kids have unfettered access to it. So check out the investigation. We'll be right back after this short break.

[00:43:13] The Bible tells us not to worry, and yet there is a lot of worrying stuff in our world today. Thankfully, the Bible doesn't stop at telling us not to worry. God gives us a next step. He says we need to pray. But sometimes even knowing what to pray can be difficult, and that is why Point of View has

[00:43:37] relaunched our Pray for America movement, a series of weekly emails to guide you in prayer for our nation. Each week you'll receive a brief update about a current issue affecting Americans, along with a written prayer that you can easily share with others. We'll also include a short free resource for you in each

[00:44:00] email so you can learn more about the issue at hand. Will you commit to Pray for America? Go to pointofview.net. Click on the Pray for America banner at the top of the page to subscribe. Again, that's pointofview.net. Click on the Pray for America banner. Let's pray together for God to make a

[00:44:25] difference in America. Point of View is produced by Point of View Ministries.