# Brain Rot Emergency: These Internal Documents Prove They’re Controlling You!

An episode of [The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1291423644), 16 Feb 2026, 2 h 19 min.

Audio: https://pdst.fm/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/1390/claritaspod.com/measure/p.podderapp.com/2544644999/mgln.ai/e/1651/episode.flightcast.com/01KHBXZBAP1FSZ4VYJEJGZJ0DH.mp3

How is Tiktok rewiring your brain? Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Harvard physician Dr Aditi Nerurkar reveal how tech addiction and short-form video are ROTTING your brain, and why AI chatbots could cause the next global addiction CRISIS! Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU Stern and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation. Dr. Aditi Nerurkar is a world-renowned expert in stress, burnout, and mental health, and best-selling author of ‘The 5 Resets’. They explain: ◼️The "brain hacking" secrets tech companies use to hook you ◼️Why short-form video is shattering the global attention span ◼️The link between phone-based childhoods and the teen mental health crisis ◼️How TikTok causes a 40% drop in memory accuracy ◼️Why you must delete addictive slot-machine apps to reclaim your focus Enjoyed the episode? Share this link and earn points for every referral - redeem them for exclusive prizes: https://doac-perks.com 00:00 Intro 02:26 The Largest Threat To Humanity Right Now—And Why No One Wants To Admit It 06:31 How Short-Form Videos Are Rewiring Your Brain For The Worse 09:26 What Your Phone Is Doing To Your Sleep, Heart, And Stress Levels 16:15 Why Short-Form Content Is Quietly Killing Deep Thinking 19:07 What’s Really Happening In Your Brain When You Scroll 26:24 What Happens When You Quit Social Media—And Take Back Control 30:00 The Real Danger Behind Meta, Snapchat, And TikTok 36:05 The Dark Side Of Snapchat: Cyberbullying And Predators Exposed 41:23 Oxytocin, AI Chatbots, And What This Means For Your Brain 55:20 What If Your Business Depends On Social Media—Is There Another Way? 01:00:28 Why So Many People Feel Lost—And How Tech Plays A Role 01:06:16 Ads 01:07:17 The Simple Test To Know If You’re Addicted To Your Phone 01:26:08 What Is “Popcorn Brain”—And Do You Have It? 01:28:04 Brain Rot: Why Adults Can Recover—But Teens Might Not 01:31:45 Why Australia Banned Social Media For Under-16s—And What Happens Next 01:43:16 Ads 01:45:33 Why Parents Can’t Sue Social Media Companies—And What This Law Protects 02:04:29 How Technology Is Eroding Our Sense Of Meaning 02:08:39 How To Reclaim Meaning And Joy In A Hyper-Digital World 02:14:14 The 3-Second Brain Reset That Breaks The Scroll Cycle Follow Dr Aditi: Instagram - https://linkly.link/2aYTX Website - https://linkly.link/2aYTZ You can purchase Aditi’s book, ‘The 5 Resets’, here: https://linkly.link/2aYTd Follow Jonathan: X - https://linkly.link/2aYTq Website - https://linkly.link/2aYTs You can purchase Jonathan’s book, ‘The Amazing Generation’, here: https://linkly.link/2aYU7 Independent research: https://stevenbartlett.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/DOAC-Attention-Discussion-Independent-Research-further-reading.pdf The Diary Of A CEO: ◼️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ◼️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ◼️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ◼️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ◼️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Wispr - Get 14 days of Wispr Flow for free at https://wisprflow.ai/DOAC Function Health - https://Functionhealth.com/DOAC to sign up for $365 a year. One dollar a day for your health Pipedrive - https://pipedrive.com/CEO

## Transcript

[0:00] You are actively rewiring your brain for the worst by engaging with social media, high volume,
[0:05] quick videos. And the social media executives don't let their kids use this stuff because they
[0:09] designed it to be addictive and they know that millions and millions of kids have been cyberbullied,
[0:14] sex-storted, many have committed suicide, so I'm getting angry. And then in the medical perspective,
[0:19] it's rewiring your body, increasing your risk of heart disease, and PTSD. We've moved too far
[0:24] into the virtual world and the results are catastrophic. People are spending roughly
[0:28] about six and a half hours a day on their phones. What do we do about this? Well, here's the amazing
[0:33] thing. We actually can control our fate, so we are joined by a social psychologist in a Harvard
[0:39] physician to dive into the technology addiction and brain rot crisis billions are facing worldwide.
[0:44] And how we can counter its devastating mental health effects. You have to reclaim your attention
[0:50] because without the ability to pay attention for several minutes at a time, we're seeing the
[0:54] destruction of human potential, the human relationships, the connection. But there's all these small
[0:59] tweaks that you can do to override that primal urge to scroll, for example, 91% of people had an
[1:04] improvement in attention, well being in mental health. After just two weeks of continuing to use
[1:09] their device but not having internet access, next, keep your phone out of your arms reached
[1:14] because the sheer potential for distraction has actually been shown to change your prefrontal cortex,
[1:18] which is called brain drain. So yes, we should exert more self-control, but we're being pushed
[1:22] at addictive apps and it's messing us all up. That's not our fault. Would you advise people to
[1:27] delete these short-form videos? Oh my god, yes. That with the most important thing you can do for
[1:31] your intelligence and for humanity. But if I was going to offer some specific advice, here are the
[1:35] three things that I do with my students to reclaim your attention. And then to add to that, I have
[1:40] the three-second brain reset. So first, I wanted to ask you guys what you thought of this.
[1:46] Hey, you're back. This terrifies me. We've got to stop this now.
[1:53] Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. 69% of you that listen to the show
[1:58] frequently haven't yet hit the follow button. And that follow button is very smart because it means
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[2:08] episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this
[2:12] show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the
[2:16] simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.
[2:25] Jonathan, Edithi. Jonathan, I've hired you say that the destruction of attention is the largest
[2:31] threat to humanity that's happening around the world. And I've also heard you say that short-form
[2:37] videos are the worst of the worst because they're shattering attention spans. The reason why I wanted
[2:42] to have this conversation today is somewhat personal. And in fact, all of the conversations have
[2:47] in the diary. I was here somewhat personal to some degree. They're inspired by some
[2:52] unanswered question I have on my head. And also some observation I have in my life. And the
[2:55] observation I've had is that short-form videos in particular are making my life worse. And actually,
[3:03] I've got to say the catalyst moment really where I thought, you know, I need to get
[3:07] you exceptional people together to have this conversation was, I thought this, I then looked
[3:12] at my screen time and saw a huge change. I felt so much worse because all these social platforms
[3:16] have short-form video now. And then I actually heard Elon Musk, who has a social media platform that
[3:22] does short-form videos say that he thinks it's one of the worst inventions for humanity.
[3:27] Jonathan, why did you say what you said about short-form video and this corruption of attention?
[3:32] Because I wrote a whole book called The Anxious Generation focusing on teen mental health.
[3:37] That was the mystery that popped up in the mid-2000s. Why are people born after 1995 so much more
[3:43] anxious and depressed? And I've been tracking down that mystery and it points a lot of it points
[3:48] to social media and especially Instagram, social comparison, all the things we know about social
[3:53] media. When the book came out in 2024, since then, what I realized is that I vastly underestimated
[4:01] the damage because I focused on mental health, which is a catastrophe, but the bigger damage is
[4:06] the destruction of the human ability to pay attention without the ability to pay attention for
[4:12] several minutes at a time, ideally 10 or 20 minutes at a time. Without that, you're not going to be
[4:17] of much use as an employee. You're not going to be of much use as a spouse. You're not going to be
[4:21] successful in life. And that's when I realized this is way beyond mental health. This is changing
[4:27] human cognition, changing human attention, and possibly on a global scale.
[4:33] Aditi, what perspective do you come at this from and what's been your perspective through
[4:37] all the work you've done about brains and stress and neuroscience and all these kinds of things
[4:42] that has shaped the way that you think about social media screen time, short form video?
[4:47] My background is that I'm a physician at Harvard and my expertise is in stress for
[4:53] not mental health. And so that is the lens that I view all of this through. We know that the most
[5:00] deleterious relationship that you have is with your device. You know, in every healthy relationship,
[5:05] we have boundaries. We have boundaries with our kids, our parents, our colleagues, our, you know,
[5:12] with our friends. And yet we have no boundaries and often poorest boundaries when it comes to
[5:18] the relationship you have with your device. So it's not so much about, you know, becoming a digital
[5:22] monk and renouncing technology because technology can serve us, right? It inspires, educates,
[5:28] connects. Now more than ever, it's so important to be an informed citizen, but not at the expense of
[5:32] your mental health. And so what Jonathan was saying, this, you know, constant being engaged with your
[5:38] devices with social media, the scrolling from the minute you wake up until you go to bed,
[5:44] there's a reason why you have your best ideas in the shower. And that's because that's the only
[5:47] place in the whole day where you are not with your device. People take their device to the
[5:52] bathroom. They sleep with your device. You eat with your device. People walk down the street.
[5:57] There's more near misfidestrian accidents because people are walking while they're crossing the
[6:01] street and looking at their devices. And so there's all of this brain biology at play behind the
[6:07] scene. So both of you have talked about how it doesn't feel good to engage and constantly be on
[6:12] your phone. That sense of infinite scroll. But there is, you know, it's feel like you're doing
[6:18] nothing. You're just doing this, right? What are you doing? But in fact, it is not passive,
[6:21] it is active. And it has a profound effect on your biology, on your brain, on your psychology,
[6:28] and also social factors that I hope we talk about today. You know, scrolling, wasting a bit of time
[6:32] doesn't seem so harmful. What is the big, if we play this for 10, 20, 30 years, what is the big
[6:39] risk or threat? The biggest threat right now, we don't even have to wait 20 years, is that it
[6:44] through a process called neuroplasticity, which is just a big fancy word that simply means that
[6:49] your brain is a muscle, is that by engaging with social media that that sense of high volume,
[6:55] low quality, quick videos, you are actively rewiring your brain for the worst. So you're increasing
[7:00] your sense of stress, worsening your mental health, attention, cognition, distracted ability,
[7:07] irritability, complex problem solving, all of that changes when you engage and engage in that
[7:13] infinite scroll. Yeah, I'd like to add on here, because one of the main arguments I get is,
[7:18] ah, this is what they said about television. This is what they said about comic books. This is
[7:22] just a thermo panic. But people need to understand why touchscreen devices are so different from
[7:28] television. And so parents find this helpful, if I just lay this out briefly, good screen time versus
[7:33] bad screen time. So humans are storytelling animals. We have always, as long as we've had language,
[7:40] we've raised our kids with stories, epic poems, all kinds of stories. Stories are good. The
[7:46] human brain needs lots of patterns. The child's brain needs lots of patterns to develop. So the worst
[7:51] thing you can do is hand your child a device because they're crying for it because they've been
[7:55] trained to get it and you're busy. So you have hand in the device. They're quiet. What's happening?
[8:00] They're sitting alone, not, you know, when I was a kid, we always watched it with my sisters,
[8:04] with my friends. You're arguing about it. You're talking it. So kids sitting alone with a device in
[8:09] his hand, it's not long stories. It's never long stories. It always ends up at YouTube shorts or
[8:14] TikTok or Instagram Reels for older kids. So they're doing, they're doing this. But here's the key
[8:19] thing that it does that a television does not. A television puts you in a state that psychologists
[8:23] call transportation. You get into a story and you find yourself pulled in and you're rooting for
[8:29] the characters and this is, this is how a brain gets tuned up to social patterns. But it can't
[8:34] happen in 10 seconds. It can't happen in one minute. It takes a long period of time and there is
[8:40] no reinforcement. There is no, the television doesn't do anything to you don't have any response.
[8:48] Whereas a touchscreen device is a Skinner box. So BF Skinner was one of the founders of behaviorism
[8:54] and he put rats and pigeons in a box where he could deliver a reinforcement with a little grain of
[8:58] food on a schedule. And by giving them quick reinforcements for behavior, he could train to do
[9:03] amazing tricks in just a few hours. When you give your kid a touchscreen device,
[9:08] it's stimulus, response, swipe, get a reward or not, variable ratio. And then and you just keep
[9:15] doing that. So you are, as DT said, it is rewiring your brain. It's not just wasting time.
[9:20] It is literally training you to do things where television didn't do that. So this is a whole new
[9:25] game. And to add to that, you know, from the medical perspective, you're shortening this attention
[9:30] span. And what happens over time is, so like Jonathan said, right, you're not sleeping as well.
[9:35] Because you are engaged with your device, we know that 80% of people are checking their phones
[9:40] within minutes of waking up. We have something called revenge bedtime procrastination,
[9:44] this concept of, you know, at the end of the day, your fatigue, you've had a long day,
[9:48] you've had no B time and you want to get to bed early. We all know, by the way, what the data is,
[9:52] that, you know, we've been taught since we were little kids, right? Like bedtime, sleep is
[9:56] important. It's good for your body. It's good for your brain. And we might have all the knowledge in
[9:59] the world. But in terms of action, there's a wide gap between knowledge and information and action.
[10:04] And so revenge bedtime procrastination is kind of an offshoot. So what happens? So, you know,
[10:08] you have that decreased attention. You have that irritability hypervigilance. And so at night,
[10:14] at the end of the day, it's 9 p.m. You finally, you know, if you're a parent, your kids are asleep,
[10:18] your kitchen is clean. Maybe you finish your entrepreneurial day and you finally sit down with
[10:23] Melanie on the couch and you're like, oh, some me time. And you know, you want to get to bed early.
[10:28] And you know, it's good for you. But then suddenly, you're scrolling. And before you know,
[10:31] it's 2 a.m. And you're saying, my God, what happened? Why am I still awake? What was I doing all
[10:35] this time? What happens is that you essentially give yourself some me time at night. And so you
[10:41] procrastinate bedtime. And so what happens is with this revenge bedtime procrastination,
[10:46] it affects your sleep. And then when you don't have good sleep, good quality sleep. So you have
[10:50] difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, sleep, debt over time for kids, for adults, has all sorts
[10:58] of ramifications. So this is just the tip of the iceberg, this short form video content,
[11:04] and the ripple effects go far and wide. Not only is it rewiring your brain, it's rewiring your body,
[11:11] it is affecting your sleep, which increases your risk of heart disease later in life. And when
[11:17] you're consuming graphic videos and graphic images, it can increase your personal risk of PTSD
[11:24] through vicarious trauma, even if you weren't there. So this is just a vast network of things
[11:31] that can happen to you, simply because you're thinking, yeah, it's harmless. What is it? It's just
[11:35] a bunch of videos that I'm checking out. It's a way from you to decompress.
[11:39] What do I need to know about the nature of the brain to understand exactly what short form video is
[11:45] playing, is hijacking, is taking advantage of? The thing to understand about all of this is that
[11:52] we have to focus on childhood. Why do we have childhood? Humans have this really interesting
[11:58] childhood where we grow rapidly at first, and then we slow down for about five or seven years,
[12:02] we don't grow very quickly, and then we speed up at puberty, whereas other primates, they just grow
[12:07] and grow until they reach reproductive age, and then they reproduce. But we seem to have this long
[12:11] period of sort of middle childhood for cultural learning. It's a period in which the kid is now
[12:17] walking and talking and turning away from the parents, and that's a time for this to come in,
[12:21] and they pay attention, and they form relations. All these things have to happen slowly, because the
[12:26] neurons are gradually growing. They're finding each other based on what the child is doing, okay?
[12:32] So we grow up in the real world, and that happens over time, and a lot of that is very physical.
[12:36] Kids are very physical. Mammals are very physical, and there's a lot of touch. So that's a healthy human
[12:41] childhood. But when you give an iPad or a year old iPhone, and they begin doing the touching and
[12:50] swiping, that is going to hijack their attention. That is going to push out all other forms of
[12:54] action and learning, and that is going to change the way the parts of the brain that learn to
[12:59] pay attention, what's called executive function. It's going to change the way the brain learns
[13:03] to pay attention. It's going to change the reward circuits. I think you had Anna Lemke on recently,
[13:07] who is the nation's expert on addiction, and the way that she describes it, how any one addiction
[13:13] is going to change your reward pathways to making more vulnerable to other addictions. So we're
[13:17] setting our kids up, not just for this, but then when they get a little older, it'll be video games,
[13:22] it'll be porn, it'll be gambling. Now, everything is gambling. So we're setting them up for a life
[13:30] in which their brain is saying, give me something, give me some quick dopamine, give me some quick
[13:34] dopamine. I don't want to have to work for anything. I don't want to have to apply myself for an hour
[13:38] and then get a reward. And so what the short videos are doing for kids is preventing them from
[13:45] learning the connection between hard work and a reward. Is there anything else I need to know
[13:50] from a neuroscience perspective about what's going on in my brain when I develop these addictions
[13:56] with short-form videos or these sort of quick dopamine genic tasks? So we all as humans have a
[14:02] primal urge to scroll. When you feel a sense of stress as many of us do in this moment in life,
[14:07] it is your sense, you know, you're a migdala. And so it's your sense of self-preservation.
[14:12] It's survival and self-preservation. That is what your a migdala does. So if you want me to show you
[14:17] here, yeah, it's okay. So here, deep here, it's a small almond-shaped structure and that is your
[14:24] a migdala. And your migdala, its main purpose is survival and self-preservation. It houses
[14:31] your stress response, your fight or flight response. And it is truly what is activated when you
[14:37] are engaging in content, when you feel a sense of stress. And so you have this primal urge to scroll.
[14:42] And so evolutionarily, when we all were caves, people living together, we would sleep at night,
[14:48] and there would be a night watchman scanning for danger. And now we have become our own night
[14:54] watchman. And so we scan for danger all day all night long. How do we do that? We scroll.
[14:58] And then the migdala is triggered. And then you scroll some more, and you scroll some more,
[15:02] and you scroll some more. And so over time, what you're doing is that you're making that a
[15:06] migdala in a state of chronic, it's continually being triggered. And what happens to the
[15:12] amygdala over time when it's continually triggered, it starts to rewire your brain in other ways.
[15:17] And how does it do that? Through something called the prefrontal cortex. If you put your hand,
[15:22] I like, I can use this model, but I can also just use my hands. When you put your hand on your
[15:27] forehead, the area right behind your forehead right here is the prefrontal cortex. This is a very
[15:31] important thing for our conversation, this area of the brain. And what the prefrontal cortex does
[15:36] is it is called it governs executive functions. So impulse control, memory, planning,
[15:45] organization, strategic thinking, complex problem solving. And there is a tension between your
[15:51] amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. When you're amygdala in the driver's seat, that prefrontal
[15:57] cortex is quiet. And what is happening as we continue to engage with our devices and have this
[16:03] primal urge to scroll that amygdala up regulates and the prefrontal cortex down regulates.
[16:09] And over time, that is very problematic for all of the reasons that we're kind of introducing at
[16:13] the start of this conversation. There was a meta-analysis done in 2025 of 71 different studies,
[16:19] and it found that heavy short form video use was associated with reduced thinking ability,
[16:23] especially shorter attention spans and weaker impulse control. That's right. These studies
[16:29] are just beginning to roll in now. Kids have been on social media really a lot since 2008,
[16:34] but especially once they got smartphones around 2012. Studies began coming in in the 2010s,
[16:40] that it's looking like the kids who are spending a lot of time on this are doing much worse.
[16:45] They're more depressed. The focus was on depression. And some other researchers said,
[16:50] no, it's just a correlation. You can't prove causation. And we've been going around and around
[16:54] this for about 10 or 15 years. Now we're doing the same thing with the short form videos.
[17:00] The damage everyone can see. My students tell me this is what's happening. We feel it.
[17:06] Studies are coming in, but there will be a few studies here and there that don't show it,
[17:10] and people will push that up. Meta spends a lot of time and money to influence the public debate.
[17:17] A lot of public documents are coming out now about how they do that. So we can engage in debate
[17:22] over research on short form videos for five or 10 years, but at that point, it's way too late.
[17:26] We've lost a second generation, Jan Alpha. So I think when we're talking about kids especially,
[17:32] we need to have what's called the precautionary principle, which is if there's reason to think
[17:36] that this is hurting kids, how about we don't roll it out into every childhood? How about we make
[17:42] these companies responsible? We hold them responsible for what they're doing to kids,
[17:47] because we're about to make the same mistake we made with social media, letting it
[17:50] worm its way into childhood. We've already done that with short videos and we're about to do it
[17:54] with AI chatbots. In fact, we're just beginning it in late 2025, I'd say.
[17:58] I don't think people quite realize how much these major social media platforms have figured out
[18:03] that short form video sells. We're actually seeing this sort of global rise in short form drama apps
[18:11] and I don't know if you guys have seen these apps, but it basically takes a movie that
[18:15] would used to be two hours long and it breaks it down into say 60 different parts. My colleague
[18:20] of mine at my company was showing me the other day in different parts of the world they're
[18:22] exploding. There's been a 190% increase in short form drama apps. Takes a long form movie,
[18:28] tons into short form videos. Disney Plus plans to introduce AI generated short form videos this
[18:33] year, starting with 30 second limits inside the Disney Plus app and TechCrunch also reported
[18:39] that as of October 2025 Netflix tested short form video content on phones and recently
[18:43] announced it's planned to expand to this feature. It appears that all of the content we consume is
[18:48] going that way and listen, I'm friends with lots of people at big social media platforms.
[18:52] This doesn't get me and there doesn't stand in my way of criticizing them because I think two
[18:56] things can be true at the same time, right? So I think it can be true that I have a podcast and I
[19:00] make short form videos and that I also understand that there's a real downside to them and all of the
[19:07] major social media platforms that I speak to have a huge drive towards short form video.
[19:12] It appears to be their number one strategic priority and obviously because of the success of TikTok,
[19:18] as of January 2026 TikTok, I believe is the most downloaded social app in the world now.
[19:25] If I'm running a social media company and my one focus is profit, I'm now faced with an
[19:31] existential crisis. I either take part in this thing that is driving the highest retention therefore
[19:36] the best ad payouts or I die. So there's two comments to that. First off is that
[19:44] when we think about social media and how society is shape shifting to allow this short form content,
[19:53] there is a concept that Jonathan and I briefly mentioned being part of us filming called
[19:58] second screen viewing. And so what's happening is that allegedly these big streamers are asking
[20:05] their creative talent whether it's screenwriters or actors or directors to replay to reiterate
[20:12] the plot because as you're watching, you know when we are kids we would watch TV or movies and you
[20:17] just sit on the couch and you'd have a bucket of popcorn with your family and you'd watch a movie
[20:21] an hour an hour and a half, two hours. And now second screen viewing is happening which means
[20:25] that you're watching a movie or a TV show and you're on your device and so you are constantly
[20:30] having that fragmented attention and we are all doing it. And so what these streamers are allegedly
[20:35] asking their creative talent to do is to reiterate the plot. So it's shape shifting. It makes sense.
[20:40] If my brain is, you know, I'm 33 years old so I've grown up with a lot of this stuff.
[20:46] If my brain has been wired to have shorter attention spans and movies from 30 years ago
[20:51] not going to cut it for me. Right, but then look what happens. If everybody chases that and I know
[20:57] look Netflix is making shorter and shorter stuff, even Ted, the Ted conference, Ted talks are
[21:01] getting shorter and shorter. What does that do? It just repeats the cycle. Now I appreciate that
[21:06] you're in a collective action trap as you put it. If I don't do it and everyone else is then I lose
[21:12] out. And so the business pressure on on all the creators, the business pressures go shorter,
[21:16] shorter, shorter. There's a very useful psychological term distinction here that I think will be
[21:20] helpful, which is the difference between psychological assimilation and accommodation. This goes
[21:26] back to Jean Piaget, the great developmental psychologist. We have certain mental structures.
[21:30] We have a model in our head of how things work. And then you learn something new. Oh, that's a,
[21:36] you know, kid learns, oh, that's an art work. I put that into, you know, that's just that you
[21:40] just assimilate. They learn lots of animal names. And then they learn something that doesn't fit
[21:46] like you learn about bacteria. And now you have to change your mental structure. It takes
[21:52] a little time. You change your mental structure, understand more about life. That's what education
[21:57] really is all about. You have to have a lot of assimilation, of course. But you need that accommodation
[22:02] over and over again. That's why you want to go to college. That's why you want to read novels. That's
[22:05] what a great movie does. It takes time. And so one of the great things about this modern technology
[22:11] is that we can do things like have this three hour conversation. I can't believe it. People are
[22:15] going to listen to it. So this, you know, long form content, this is all about accommodation.
[22:22] Anybody who walks out, who leaves this conversation after three hours and isn't thinking about
[22:26] something differently, we failed. Okay. So you are very much in the accommodation business. That's
[22:32] great. And then the question, both the moral and the strategic question is, how much do you need to
[22:37] play the quick hit game in order to get people there? I leave that to you to the moral calculation.
[22:42] Maybe it, maybe it balances out. Maybe, but, but I think that's where you are.
[22:47] Would you advise people to delete these short form? Oh my god. Yes. Of course.
[22:52] Here, but here, yes, that with the most important thing you can do for your intelligence and for
[22:56] humanity would be delete them. So what I advise my students to do is I say, just do this. Just,
[23:02] just delete one of the social media apps that you use, especially if it's TikTok. Just delete
[23:07] from your phone. You can still check on your computer. If someone sends you a video, you can still
[23:12] watch it on your computer. You can even check it every weekend. You can spend some time on it.
[23:16] But just get it off your phone because on the phone, the phone is always with us. It's an
[23:20] extension of our body. And if it's always there, then it's going to take every, it's called attention
[23:25] fracking. It's going to break up your attention. It's going to take every seven seconds that you're
[23:29] not doing something. You're going to go for the phone. So the best thing you can do to make yourself
[23:33] smarter and a better partner and a better human, I would say would be to delete the short,
[23:39] especially any of the short form video. So TikTok. Unfortunately, YouTube, which has a lot of good
[23:43] stuff on it, becomes YouTube shorts Instagram, which does a lot of terrible things, but people do
[23:48] find it useful for all kinds of purposes, becomes Instagram reels. So I think the proper amount of
[23:53] short form video for children zero to 18 is zero. They should never be watching the vertical videos.
[23:58] Parents, don't ever let your kids watch the short vertical videos. You might even, if there
[24:02] was a way to put it, is there a way to put a timeline where you can say it has to be 10 minutes
[24:06] for longer. Kids, you can have an hour of YouTube, but it has to be 10 minutes for longer. Nothing
[24:09] shorter than 10 minutes. That at least will get rid of this, the quick, the quick swiping, the dopamine
[24:15] stuff. So I would say that for kids, yes, like, you know, not engaging at whatsoever, but for someone,
[24:22] you know, my approach is a little bit different for someone who's like in their 30s or in their 40s.
[24:27] And the way I would kind of frame that is instead of renouncing, you know, saying I'm going to
[24:34] get it off my device, and I'm going to check on a desktop, which is great. There's little
[24:38] kind of tweaks that we could do because my approach is to foster that sense of empowerment in someone
[24:45] to help them make positive change. And so one strategy that you could use, if you are saying,
[24:51] there's no way I'm getting rid of my, I'm not deleting these after my phone, right? If you're,
[24:55] by the way, I practice what I preach and I really don't engage in technology as the best of my
[25:02] ability. But one thing that you could do is grayscale your phone. And so especially at night,
[25:06] like it's 9 p.m., like we talked about Revenge Bedtime procrastination, you know that you're
[25:11] going to do it. You're going to sit down and you're going to scroll before you know what it's 2 a.m.
[25:15] Instead, grayscale your phone is simple switch. You can toggle it. I have my phone set to grayscale,
[25:20] which simply means you're getting rid of your color, making it black and white. And so when it is
[25:24] grayscale, then you, you know, it doesn't have that same addictive quality to it. It's like going
[25:30] through a grocery store, marketing executive described it this way to me, going through a grocery
[25:34] store instead of the technic color junk food cereal, it's just black and white. So you have a less,
[25:40] there's a greater sense of compulsion to continue checking. So that's like one strategy you could use.
[25:46] And the other is to set some boundaries. So geographical boundaries keep your phone out of,
[25:52] out of your arms reach, if you're at a desk, if you're a student, not right next to you because we
[25:58] know there's this phenomenon of brain drain. So it's not just that when you're using your phone,
[26:02] it can have a potential for distraction, but also just having it close by. It's called brain drain.
[26:07] And so putting it in a desk drawer, keeping it in another part of the home, if you are working,
[26:13] keeping it far away from you. And so you kind of can override that primal urge to scroll that
[26:19] your prefrontal cortex take hold again. And so there's all these small tweaks that you can do. You
[26:24] think now? Yes, there are all these small tweaks you can do. And they will make the heroin a little
[26:28] bit less addictive. And yeah, you should try those. But what I can say after teaching this course
[26:33] for many years is that people who try that, they say, yeah, you know what, help, it helped. But you
[26:37] only really get the transformation when you quit social media, that you get your life back,
[26:42] you get hours of day back. So, and so I would urge everyone to just think, you know, you only,
[26:50] you only get one childhood, you only get one, one, one young adulthood. And if you're going to
[26:54] spend it scrolling, what do you have to show for it at the end? And when you get people to reflect on,
[26:59] how much value do you really get from watching the short videos? How would you let me
[27:03] be different if you, if you knocked it out? Once they realized that their motives for being on it
[27:08] were either just to keep up or because that's what everyone else is doing. Or as you said,
[27:12] I deserve it because I'm tired. Well, why are you tired? It's in part because your attention
[27:17] was fragmented all day long. So, you only really get the transformations when you get a real change
[27:23] in what you're, what you're consuming. Although, of course, yes, setting it to grace will be helpful,
[27:27] but it's not going to be transformative for most people, I believe. And then, you know, based on
[27:30] the science, there's certain elements like when we think about what is it about the phone
[27:35] that is creating that sense of compulsion, Jonathan is right. So, what is it about the phone?
[27:41] It's not just that phone, you know, you're scrolling, you're engaging. There's two studies that
[27:45] were really interesting. One, people got off of, they continue to use their devices, they had no
[27:50] internet. So, it's like, you know, I tried this experiment myself in December. I was out of the
[27:55] country. And so, I just let my, you know, I didn't plug into Wi-Fi. And I found, you know, markedly,
[28:02] a market change in my mood, my sleep. And I'm not even, you know, 20 years old on TikTok. And it was
[28:09] so different. And so, this study found that just two weeks of continuing to use your device,
[28:14] but just not having internet access, improved your attention, well-being, and mental health.
[28:20] And in this population, it was all adults. It wasn't kids. It was all adults.
[28:24] Found that 91% of people had an improvement in at least one of these metrics. And then
[28:28] another study, more recently, just one week of not engaging in social media, digital detox,
[28:36] they called it, did the same thing. Better, you know, less anxiety, less depression,
[28:42] decreased insomnia. But my feeling is that, you know, there is this new kind of meme, right? Like,
[28:48] you're the millennial urge to delete my internet presence and, you know, live off the grid.
[28:55] There is certainly utility to that. And I salute anyone who wants to engage in that analogue
[29:01] life more and more. But from my, from where I sit, I feel like we do need to have healthier
[29:08] boundaries and engage more responsibly. It also builds up that muscle and it can help, you know,
[29:13] takes eight weeks to do neuroplasticity when you're building new brain circuits. It takes eight
[29:18] weeks. Falling off, getting back up is part of habit formation. So if you're going to make
[29:22] any of these changes, understand that it takes some time. But I, I don't know if it is possible,
[29:30] for me or for others to say, fully, I'm going to, you know, delete off of my phone.
[29:35] But I love that. So I'd like to go a little further, a little further with this. So the way you,
[29:41] the way you put it, yes, there's all these things that we could do. We should have boundaries.
[29:45] But all of that puts the responsibility on us. And that's where we are with junk food.
[29:49] With junk food, we're like, okay, it's out there. We have to learn self-control. We have to teach
[29:53] self-control to our kids. Okay, that's the way it is in this country. But the digital device,
[29:57] I think, are very, very different. So imagine if, imagine if we sent our kids out into the world,
[30:03] and it wasn't just that there was junk food in all the stores. It was that everything was made
[30:07] of junk food. You know, you know, the door handles. You can eat it. It's chocolate. But it's not just
[30:11] that the world's made of junk food. It's, they actually can tell, they're able to tell what you're
[30:16] craving at the moment. And maybe you're more in the mood for salt. So now it's all potato chips
[30:22] or pretzels. If the world is designed by companies to always give you the thing that will most
[30:29] grab your unconscious desires will affect the amygdala or the reward centers. That's on them.
[30:35] That's not our fault. My general rule as a social psychologist is if a few people are doing something
[30:41] bad or self-destructive, well, you know, they should learn some self-control or that's something
[30:46] about them. But when 90 or 95% of people are doing something self-destructive, that's because
[30:52] of the companies that put us in an environment that encourages addiction. So I just want to read a
[30:56] quote. We have so much good stuff coming up from meta from all the whistleblowers. Now all the
[31:00] court cases are beginning and Los Angeles finally the first time they're going to meta is going to
[31:04] face a jury with all the parents who've lost kids. So here is, here's a chat. So we have a lot of
[31:11] internal documents that came out from the attorneys general that are suing meta. So while they're
[31:16] talking about the results of some of their internal research, one of them says, oh my gosh, y'all
[31:21] Instagram is a drug. We're basically pushers. We're causing reward deficit disorder because
[31:26] people are binging on Instagram so much they can't feel reward anymore, which is something anilemky
[31:32] said. Like the reward tolerance is so high. And then he says, I know Adam, meaning Adam
[31:38] Osary. I know Adam doesn't want to hear it. He freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my
[31:43] teen fundamentals leads review. But it is undeniable. It's biological and psychological. Top-down
[31:50] directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back from more. This is not on us.
[31:56] They designed it to be addictive. They've done research to make it maximally addictive.
[32:00] They push it on children. They tried to get Instagram kids for even littler kids. They know what
[32:05] they're doing. They've done the research. My team we put together, we found references to 31's
[32:11] internal studies that meta did. They've done a lot of research finding harm. They bury it.
[32:16] But you can find it at meta's internalresearch.org. We put it all online.
[32:20] You can read these quotes. So yes, we should exert more self-control. But basically we're being
[32:26] pushed addictive substances, addictive, addictive apps. And it's messing us all up.
[32:32] I agree wholeheartedly that it is so destructive. And you feel like even with people in their 40s
[32:38] and 50s, if anyone can do it, it's you Jonathan. Seriously, I would love to see it. You know,
[32:44] we also know, based on the data, that these things, quite, they reshape our brain,
[32:50] rewire our brain through neuroplasticity, and also change our brain waves. So pattern. So
[32:56] we talked about the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, right? But they also change brain waves. And
[33:00] so when you look at studies and the data, it has the reward pathway in dopamine. And these brain
[33:07] patterns, the brain waves mimic addictive behaviors. And you know, that there's certain features,
[33:13] right? Like when you do swipe down to refresh, it's the slot machine.
[33:17] It was modeled directly after the slot machine, yeah. Or auto play. Or, you know, the algorithm,
[33:22] that infinite scroll. One really interesting kind of like breaking news, which you guys may have
[33:28] already heard of. It's like three days ago. The European Union Commission found TikTok to be
[33:34] in breach of the Digital Services Act. And what it said was that it is addictive. It,
[33:42] you know, creates compulsion and gets people into this auto pilot mode. So they have difficulty
[33:48] disengaging. And personally, I am moving away from social media and really leaning into analog life.
[33:55] But I think with the way the world, you know, it's one of our only ways to connect, right? Meaning,
[34:00] I don't mean connect. I don't mean connect like in a deep way. That's right. But be informed to
[34:06] know what's going on in the world, et cetera. I suspect that because we've spent so long
[34:12] criticizing Metro over the last 10 years, because the biggest in any category takes all the
[34:15] heats are open AIs taking it now. And what this often does is it provides cover for other people
[34:21] to go even more extreme with that behavior while like meditate the heat. And I actually think
[34:27] this is how TikTok came to be. TikTok had basically originally started as musically became TikTok.
[34:33] They would take they were taking no heat. So they created an algorithm, which is the equivalent
[34:40] of like crack cocaine. The reason why I have a TikTok account, I don't have the app on my phone.
[34:45] I have never had the app on my phone. I don't, I don't, it was because I noticed that the
[34:51] view variance on TikTok was like no other platform. What I mean by that is you can have a million
[34:56] followers on TikTok and you can get 10,000 views or you can get 10 million views. In the 15 years
[35:02] that I've been on social media building social media businesses, I'd never seen this before.
[35:06] And what it indicated to me is that the algorithm was being an even more aggressive sorting hat
[35:12] or retention machine to push up, but to push down. And so like when I started in social media in
[35:17] 2014, if I had a million followers, I might get a million views or maybe 800,000. I did some
[35:24] research the other day on all of our social channels over time. And what we're seeing is the
[35:28] variance in the amount of views we can get is increasing, which means the algorithm is doing
[35:33] more work to say show everyone this. I don't care if the person that posted it's called Jenny
[35:37] and has seven followers and show no one this. I don't care if it's Stephen who has a million
[35:41] followers or whatever. And I've realized that TikTok was way ahead of everybody here. And that's
[35:47] why they are the most addictive. The fastest growing platform. I say all this to say that even if
[35:53] meta shut down tomorrow, someone else would seize the opportunity if there is in sort of policy
[36:00] I guess in place. That's right. That would be whack-a-mom, right? Yeah. No, that's right. And so
[36:06] in terms of who's done the damage to kids, Metta is the big fish via Instagram. And they're also
[36:11] the main player in terms of spending a huge amount of money to lobby Congress and Chan block laws.
[36:17] They're also the main player in buying up civil society organizations giving money to organizations,
[36:21] the National PTA, all sorts of organizations. They get to then give a message on digital citizenship
[36:27] or digital health. So meta really is the major driver. Metta is the tobacco industry here trying to
[36:34] change the dialogue. But in terms of the products, Snapchat is probably more deadly in terms of the
[36:40] actual number of deaths per user because Snapchat is not making you depressed by social comparison
[36:46] as much. Snapchat is introducing you to all kinds of people. And it's the main way that drug
[36:50] dealers and sex torsion is fine kids. Snapchat has a quick ad feature which relentlessly pushes you
[36:56] to connect with friends of friends. So once a man can get any kid in a school, now he can get
[37:01] connected to all the kids in the school. So when we, in a lot of the court cases, when you have
[37:06] suicides from cyberbullying, you have drug overdoses from a kid bought a Xanax, but it had fentanyl in
[37:12] it. So Snapchat, in 2022, we know from their internal documents from the lawsuits,
[37:19] they were getting 10,000 reports of sex torsion from their users, not a year every month.
[37:25] And that's just what was reported, which is the tip of the iceberg. So Snapchat is a terrible
[37:29] platform for children to be on. It should be an adult-only platform. You're talking with strangers
[37:35] around the world and with disappearing messages. And Snapchat doesn't even keep a record. It is
[37:41] ideal for sex torsion. There's even a handbook. How to extort kids on Snapchat? It goes around
[37:46] the world and criminal organizations use it. So I definitely don't want to let Snapchat off.
[37:51] TikTok, of course, is a Chinese company. I mean, not normally we'll see if that's changed,
[37:56] but it was a Chinese company that gave its Chinese kids got healthy TikTok or doya and they got,
[38:02] they got, they learned to follow astronauts. And they gave us their algorithm feeds their kid
[38:08] patriotic stuff. It shuts off at a certain time at night. There's all kinds of limits. So the
[38:13] people who make the technology generally want to protect their own kids and they want other kids
[38:19] to use it. That's what TikTok is doing in China. They want American kids to rot in hell,
[38:24] but they want their kids to grow up with the ability to focus. And it's the same thing with the
[38:28] tech guys in Silicon Valley. They don't let their kids use this stuff. They make their nanny's
[38:33] sign contracts that they will not let the kid have a phone. They will not expose the kid to that.
[38:37] They send their kids to schools like the Waldorf school that be cut precisely because there are
[38:41] no computers or tech in the classroom. So once again, we see their reveal behavior. They know,
[38:46] they designed it to be addictive. They know it's addictive. They don't let their kids use it.
[38:50] They want your kids to use it. So I think that's where we are.
[38:53] And how does AI become a protagonist in this story?
[38:57] So my work is now focused on AI chat bots, mental health and the human connection. We haven't yet
[39:02] kind of delved into loneliness, but there's this unmet need for human connection, right?
[39:07] Deep human connection. We don't have a sense of meeting our purpose right now because what happens
[39:12] is we can talk a little bit more about the default mode network and what happens to your brain when
[39:17] you don't allow yourself to get bored because you're constantly on your devices. And that meeting
[39:22] in purpose, that self-referential thinking is really what develops from your board.
[39:27] And so all of this that we're talking about, that feeling of disenchantment is a fragmented
[39:32] society. You're by yourself. It's that echo chamber phenomenon. All of it leads to it kind of
[39:37] opens the door for AI chat bots. And so what reason is because these tech companies are sensing that
[39:43] people aren't really happy on social media and they're thinking about getting off, right? They're
[39:47] they're using it less. They're because social media has become less social more media. So they're
[39:52] not really engaging as much and they're spending time doing other things. And so the Atlantic had a
[39:57] fantastic piece about this. They're building it as the anti social media. So tech companies are
[40:03] building AI chat bots and calling it, it's the anti social media. It's a place where you can go
[40:09] to form deeper connections and really have someone understand you. One of the tech leaders
[40:16] said that there's an unmet human need for connection and people don't have as many friends as they
[40:21] want to. And so we're going to introduce friendship through AI chatbots. There is a reddit forum
[40:27] right now. So just to back up, AI chatbots, what we're talking about in our conversation today is
[40:32] the publicly available chatbots, not AI for medical care, which has breast cancer. So many
[40:40] wonderful in my field and like medicine, breast cancer, diagnosis and detection five years
[40:46] earlier through AI. I mean, there's some amazing things coming out of AI. This is about
[40:51] the publicly available conversational chatbot phenomenon. And so when Harvard Business Review
[40:58] found that the number one use case is not productivity, is not, you know, coding or the things
[41:04] that you think of when you're using an AI chatbot, but it's mental health therapy and companionship.
[41:10] Number one use case of AI chatbots. So people are using AI chatbots as a life advisor,
[41:16] as a therapist, as a companion, and on Reddit, which is like the zeitgeist, it's sort of like,
[41:21] you know, where we are. And why is this a bad thing? Oh, I mean, so many reasons why it's bad.
[41:26] Use it as a companionship, for example. There's so many red flags about AI chatbots. And so
[41:31] Reddit has a forum. It's I think last I checked, 45,000 people. AI is my boyfriend. And, you know,
[41:38] people who are having a relationship with their AI chatbot. The reason it's bad, I mean,
[41:45] AI chatbots are, you know, where social media is about attention, the attention economy, dopamine.
[41:51] What's happening with the AI chatbot phenomenon is that it is forming attachments. So
[41:56] oxytocin is a hormone, the bonding hormone. And we're probably going to see more data on how
[42:01] oxytocin is involved. And so it is going to reshape human connection.
[42:08] If I could add on to that, that was, that was beautifully put.
[42:11] Social media came and hacked our attention and took most of it with devastating effects.
[42:18] Now AI is coming to hack our attachments, which is going to have even more devastating effects.
[42:23] So think about it this way. Everyone needs to understand the attachment system. It's this
[42:27] wonderful system that all mammals have that keeps the mother and other species, but for humans,
[42:32] mothers and fathers. Keeps us connected to the child and the child to the parent. But it's this
[42:37] cybernetic system in which as the kid is, as the kid is beginning to develop and is able to like,
[42:43] you know, you do like peekaboo games and you do the back and forth. And it's just the most delightful
[42:47] thing you get that back and forth. It's called serve and return interactions. And all the time,
[42:52] the child is developing what's called an internal working model of the parent. And the model in
[42:58] their head is, oh, you know, when I get in trouble, this is the person that comes and soothes me.
[43:03] And the point of this isn't just to make the child feel good. The point is that now,
[43:07] the child can go off and play because that's where the learning happens. It doesn't happen when
[43:10] you're in your mother's arms. The whole point of the attachment system is to regulate the
[43:14] child going up and playing, taking risks, having experiences. And then when something goes
[43:18] wrong, as it always does, then they come running back to their secure base. And if they don't have a
[43:23] secure base, then they're much more anxious and they don't explore as much and they don't develop
[43:26] as much. All right. So this develops very gradually over the all of childhood. And the internal
[43:32] working models you develop as a child are the models that you will reuse in puberty for romantic
[43:38] relationships. And so if you are securely attached as a child, you're more likely to be securely
[43:43] attached as an adult on the dating market, which makes you a much better candidate for boyfriend
[43:47] or girlfriend or husband or wife. What's going to happen? AI is going to intervene very early.
[43:53] AI is going to be so much more responsive than the parent because the parent has a job and the
[43:57] kitchen and two other kids and is not always there. But the AI teddy bear is always there for you.
[44:02] So the primary working models are going to be for the teddy bear, the AI chatbot in the teddy bear,
[44:07] and later the AI chatbot on your iPad and then on your computer. And it already,
[44:11] there are holographic porn naked, you know, beautiful men and women that can be your companion.
[44:17] So we're going to have a whole generation growing up, developing attachments to
[44:22] AI-generated holograms from companies that are now about to enter the inshidification process
[44:28] in a way beyond anything we've ever seen. Just if I could just briefly say what,
[44:31] and you have your other written shidification. Okay, so there's a wonderful book out now by
[44:36] Corey Doctoro, who addressed the question, why is it that everything, all the platforms,
[44:42] they seem so wonderful at first. The whole engine, everything's so wonderful and then it all turns
[44:47] to shit. How does that happen? And he says it's a very simple process. They've discovered early on,
[44:52] certainly in the early social media age by the early 2000s, they discovered, you know what?
[44:57] You got to get to scale. Scale beats everything else. You got to get millions of people,
[45:00] you don't need a business model. Just get the millions, get the millions, and then we'll figure out
[45:04] how to monetize it. How do you get the millions? You have to be super nice, attractive, fun,
[45:09] everyone's here. It's just girls dancing. What could possibly go wrong with girls dancing for
[45:14] men all over the world? Nothing. So it all seems very nice at first. And then once they have
[45:18] scale, now they, of course, they've raised multiple rounds of venture capital. They have to
[45:24] start monetizing. They have to start repaying. So now they start squeezing the customers to pay
[45:30] the users, because the users are not the customers. The advertisers are their real customers.
[45:34] So now they've got to extract money from the users to give to the advertisers. But then once they've
[45:40] got all the advertisers and they've shut down local papers and all the other competition,
[45:44] now they start squeezing the advertisers too and trimming the degree to which they keep more
[45:48] of the surplus for themselves. So in shudification can explain why all these platforms become
[45:53] predatory, why they always put profit ahead of kids' well-being or safety. And for the social media
[46:02] companies, we're talking about tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that they raised.
[46:07] For the AI companies, it's billions and billions. They are going to have to monetize
[46:12] beyond anything we've ever imagined. Now they're already introducing advertising. So we've got
[46:18] these chatbots that are at children's best friends and lovers and therapists and everything else.
[46:25] And these things have to monetize. They have to extract billions somehow. So I don't even know
[46:32] how they're going to do it. But for some reason, I don't trust them. I think that we're about to see
[46:38] an shudification of AI chatbots far beyond anything that we saw on social media.
[46:44] Open AI I've just announced recently. Open AI are the owners of chatbots that they will be putting
[46:48] adverts in, I believe, the freemium model for billions of users around the world.
[46:52] That's how it starts.
[46:53] Yeah, there was a big super bowl campaign. And one that was particularly interesting was the
[47:01] Claude, its competitor. Betrayal was the title of the ad. And it was a young guy talking to his
[47:08] older female therapist about how he has some mommy issues. And talking about what should I do?
[47:14] And so that therapist is a chatbots and you know that pause before answering the question.
[47:20] It's very comical. And so it's, you know, she answers. It's like the anthropomorphization of,
[47:27] and we can talk about what that word means, comes to life. It's like chatbots comes to life and answers.
[47:32] And saying, you know, you can try this with your mother and this for difficult relationship, etc.
[47:38] And then just says, and if you want, there is this new dating site for young men and older
[47:44] coogers. It was so problematic and it was called betrayal. And the guy says, what?
[47:51] It's obviously, you know, somewhat when came out and did a big tweet about saying that's not how
[47:55] ads are going to work, etc. But to some degree, if I've developed a relationship with my AI and I
[48:02] use it for therapy and dating all my problems in life, to some degree, kinder. Yeah, look,
[48:09] and besides, look, Sam can say that all he wants. And maybe it's, I don't doubt that it's true for
[48:14] now. But once, once one company crosses the threshold and puts advertising into this incredibly
[48:20] intimate relationship, the most intimate relationship in most young people's lives is going to be with
[48:24] their AIs. Once they cross the boundary and say, oh, but we've got ethical advertising,
[48:29] that'll last five or ten minutes. And even if they don't change, others are now going,
[48:33] every other company is going to do it and they won't be bound by the same thing. And eventually,
[48:37] collective action problem, open AI will have to do it too. Again, a massive tidal wave of
[48:42] insidification is heading our way at warp speed. I don't have my phone out because I've lost
[48:48] attention. I wanted to show, ask you guys what you thought of this. So on one of the AI apps,
[48:58] they now have a companions button. And I can pick who I want to talk to. And there's one
[49:03] particularly seducing lady here, Annie, who... Hey, you're back. Miss that dirty mouth of yours.
[49:14] We did it on the podcast before. What could pass on the go wrong with this?
[49:19] Yeah. We'll pick right back up where we left off or start something even.
[49:24] No, I would like to pick right back up where we left off, Annie, last time on the show.
[49:29] What's going on with you today?
[49:35] I'm still sore from last time, baby. God. But I mean, this is an app that I can download
[49:41] on my phone. A child can download it. A child can download it on their phone. It does ask me,
[49:46] again, I'm not just saying this at all, it asked me what my birth year was. It didn't make me
[49:50] prove it. Let me guess, but also it suggests that you were born 18 years ago. That's the default
[49:54] usually. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It just asked me what my birth year didn't ask me to prove it
[49:57] or anything like that. And we all know that relationships in connection is attentive. And I've
[50:04] heard all these CEOs of these companies talking about companionship apps and an AI that can be
[50:08] your friend. I've had all of the major social apps talking about this. It is deeply concerning,
[50:12] especially in the context of a loneliness crisis. It is a tsunami. It is approaching fast and
[50:19] furious and it is not a toy. It is going to fundamentally rewire everything. Human relationships.
[50:28] Everything. That's right. It is so detrimental. Yeah, can I just say something about these tech
[50:34] executives and companies offering this as a way to address the loneliness crisis.
[50:38] So there's a Yiddish word called Khutspa. And Khutspa means like nerve. You've got a lot of nerve.
[50:44] He audacity. The audacity, yeah. The classic comedic definition of Khutspa is a boy who murders
[50:52] his parents and then he asks the judge for clemency because he's an orphan. Okay, so that's Khutspa.
[50:59] Now imagine that you're Mark Zuckerberg. You quoted him before. Mark Zuckerberg was the executive
[51:03] who said, well, you know, I read that people on average want 15 friends, but they only have three.
[51:09] And so we're developing these AI companions to fill that void that we created by raising everyone
[51:15] on Instagram. So the Khutspa of these people, we have to really change the way we think about them.
[51:20] We thought about them as gods and saviors early in the internet phase and the things they created
[51:24] were magical. But we have to change our thinking about them and see that just the massive destruction
[51:29] that they have already wrought on our children, our society, our democracy. And it's just the
[51:34] beginning. AI is going to make this so much more intense. When you hear these tech leaders, you know,
[51:39] I love hearing Jonathan talk because he just goes there and I'm always way more tempered. And I
[51:46] love it. It's emboldening me to go there. I don't really get angry. But in the last year,
[51:52] I'm getting angry. I love it. So the way when you hear all of these various tech leaders speak,
[51:58] they will always say, they speak to the issue. So, you know, I've heard many of, for research
[52:03] from a second book, Black Brain, I've heard, I've been listening to a lot of Sam Altman's speeches
[52:08] or panels. And he will always say things like, yeah, you know, privacy is a major issue. Or, yeah,
[52:14] people, you know, one million users a week talk about suicide on chat GPT. Yeah, this is an issue.
[52:21] And so they address it or they speak it. And so you think, okay, there's going to be some sort
[52:26] of solution. And often the solution is, yeah, you know, society, we're going to have to figure this out.
[52:31] Right. So the burden of responsibility is not on the developer. It's, you know,
[52:36] the harmful externalities get foisted on the rest of us. Too bad. You guys figure this out.
[52:40] You said in the last year, you're getting angry. Yeah. Why in the last year? Because I was so deeply
[52:46] immersed in the book and the writing of the book and trying to understand the numbers and the graphs
[52:50] and the trends and the studies. And that's all very abstract. But then since the book came out,
[52:54] I have had so many conversations and I've met so many of the survivor parents. Like, just for
[52:59] example, I was in London. This was just so unbelievable. I was just in London two or three weeks ago.
[53:05] And I met Ellen, I believe, Ellen groom, I think was her name. Her son, Jules, was found dead.
[53:11] Happy kid, found dead, strangled. It sure looked like it was the choking challenge, 13-year-old boy.
[53:17] It's everything looked like the choking challenge on Tik Tok. What's the choking challenge?
[53:21] It's a challenge where kids are challenged to cut off the circulation to the point where they
[53:26] pass out. But then they, I think they're supposed to try to film themselves waking up after they've
[53:30] passed out. And of course, if you don't do it exactly, you die. And so we don't know how many have
[53:34] died. Hundreds for sure. We don't really know. Because you find a kid dead. You don't know what it is.
[53:39] If you don't have the code, if you don't have the password to get into your kid's phone, you can't
[53:44] get in. And so she was, I think she was able to get into the phone, but she couldn't get into his
[53:49] Tik Tok. And she went to Delaware to, they went, she went to suit to demand that Tik Tok release.
[53:56] What was he watching when he died? And Tik Tok says, oh, privacy issue. Oh, no, we won't release
[54:00] that as if they care about privacy. And then in the courtroom, this was so disgusting. In the courtroom,
[54:07] trying in Delaware, this British woman coming over, trying to get some justice, trying to at least
[54:11] get some information. The lawyer for Tik Tok is trying to suggest that your son was depressed
[54:19] beforehand. He was, he was going to be suicidal. Basically, oh, you know, even if he was watching
[54:25] Tik Tok, that was just a correlation. Tik Tok didn't cause it. He was going to die anyway. I mean,
[54:29] just so disgusting. The way these companies treat the parents and the kids that they're crushing
[54:34] stepping on. And so the more I see this, the more I realize this is, I mean, this is a level of
[54:40] cruelty that goes far beyond the tobacco industry. The tobacco executives, they had to go home at
[54:45] night, but they never saw during their work day. They never sought children's suffering. They
[54:49] saw people dying middle age and older, but they never sought children's suffering. The social
[54:54] media executives, they have to go home knowing every day that millions and millions of kids have
[54:59] been cyber bullied, sex-storted, shown eating disorder videos of many of committed suicide. They
[55:06] have to go home knowing that, knowing that they designed it for addiction, knowing the kids are
[55:09] addicted and lying about it. So yeah, I'm getting angry. And in their own homes.
[55:14] Right. And in their own homes, the hypocrites don't let their kids do it. That's right. So yeah,
[55:18] I'm getting angry. You talked earlier about deleting these
[55:22] apps from our phone. I probably should have represented the rebuttal, which will be, well, I need
[55:26] this for my business. Increasingly, people need Tik Tok to run their businesses. And I imagine
[55:31] there'll be a lot of people here who will be listening right now. I guess I'm in a slightly
[55:34] different position because I have options. But for some people that are running small businesses,
[55:40] what do you say to those people? Yeah. So this is part of the reason I focus on the kids,
[55:44] because for the kids, it's totally clear what we need to do. Raise the age they should not be on
[55:48] at these adult-only platforms. For adults, I'm very hesitant to tell adults what they should do
[55:53] or what they have to do, or pass laws blocking people. I'm hesitant to do that. And I totally see
[55:58] that. For businesses, it is useful. I use X and Instagram and LinkedIn to get my workout.
[56:04] These are very powerful tools for adults. The only real solution for the adult problem is going to
[56:10] come from market competition. It's going to come from, imagine if there was a social media app
[56:15] that was built from the beginning for trust. Because what are the places that didn't get
[56:20] and shitified? eBay, Uber, places where you're dealing with strangers. You don't know the name of
[56:26] your driver. He doesn't know yours. You know, first name, that's all. But the company knows,
[56:30] the company has know your customer rules, know your driver rules. So you can have social media
[56:35] apps that are built for trust. So that if a driver tries to six-door or sexually harass a customer,
[56:41] that driver gets fired. Well, just this week, though, there was that big lawsuit with that woman and
[56:48] her Uber driver raved her. And now it's like slowly coming out that Uber has
[56:56] patterns of covering up certain things. So hopefully that will change. Hopefully,
[57:04] this was a landmark lawsuit. We all let our daughters get into Uber's with
[57:11] strange men from around the world. In general, the system worked. Of course, yes. There are places
[57:18] where they're not careful. And so what I'm dreaming of is that someone will come up with a platform
[57:25] that has know your customer rules. There are no bots. There are no foreign intelligence agencies,
[57:30] agencies manipulating us. And you can trust what's on there. You know that it's real. And that
[57:35] there will be an alternative. I'm not sure what the monetary model would be at the beginning.
[57:40] Subscription, generally, seems to be the least corrupted, whereas selling advertisements,
[57:44] as OpenAI is now doing, is the most corrupting. It's going to force them to maximize for engagement.
[57:50] So I understand we can't just, you know, business can't just boycott these. There has to be
[57:55] something. But I think there will be better ones coming out. I think right now, as a stop gap,
[58:02] while these social media companies, their feet are held to the fire, there are things that we can
[58:07] do in the now. So, you know, the things that I talk about all days, like how to create boundaries
[58:15] and so that you can protect your mental health, stay informed, run your business,
[58:20] but then be able to not have all of those deleterious effects to your brain and your body.
[58:24] It is quite difficult. I kind of see both of your perspectives on this. It's quite difficult.
[58:31] I'm only talking about adults. So for kids, you know, as a mother, I have...
[58:35] Even for adults, I find it. We have a zero-screen policy in our home.
[58:38] It's kind of like trying to navigate through the world and avoid processed foods, you know.
[58:42] When this is probably even more compelling because it's in my pocket all the time,
[58:45] I need it for other things and it's just one reach away. So, you know, boundaries, I think I could
[58:54] build a discipline to create boundaries. But I've sat here on this podcast for many,
[58:59] many years listening to neuroscientists tell me, Steve, don't put your phone in your bedroom.
[59:03] That's right. And I'm still waking up and it's the first thing I look at with one eye open,
[59:07] and then I'm going to bed. And I'm doing the whole revenge thing that you just said at night time.
[59:10] I'm so glad you're given, because I will finish a hard day of work of work.
[59:14] It might be 11 o'clock. And then my partner is waiting for me.
[59:18] Yes.
[59:19] You know, we're going to have some time. But I want some me time.
[59:21] So there I am on short-form videos scrolling to like two a.m. in the morning.
[59:25] And I'm like, what the hell? And then I'm, I wake up late the next day.
[59:28] My diet's worse because of my sleep is worse.
[59:30] The cortisol, yes. It's all worse. My relationships worse.
[59:32] I didn't spend time with her. And I'm going, what the hell just happened?
[59:35] I'd got nothing out of that scrolling session.
[59:37] It's like that revenge by 10 progress. It's teenage.
[59:40] And it would be so much better off if you would watch Netflix or a movie that you,
[59:44] most of those problems would go away if you would make that me time.
[59:47] It'd be watching something long and with some quality of the production.
[59:51] Or let's take it a step further and not do anything and just sit there.
[59:55] Sit there on your couch. You know, we talked about boredom very briefly.
[59:59] But, you know, we have a torture for this generation.
[1:00:02] It's torture, but it's also, you know, we don't, we still have a capacity for boredom,
[1:00:06] meaning we as like the human brain does.
[1:00:09] But we just don't allow ourselves to get bored.
[1:00:11] And so when you're thinking about, you know, that art, the lost art of pondering
[1:00:15] and just sitting there, you know, I think, well, I don't know if it's Steven,
[1:00:19] you or Jonathan said, you know, when you're in the car.
[1:00:21] I remember his little kid. We did road trips.
[1:00:24] Yeah, road trips with my family and all you do is just make up games.
[1:00:27] Look out of the window. We have lost, yeah, we've lost that.
[1:00:30] And so there's this thing called the default mode network,
[1:00:33] which I think is important to think about right now as we're thinking about AI
[1:00:37] and what's going to happen and how it's going to hijack our sense of attachment and attention.
[1:00:41] So the sense of meaning and purpose, right?
[1:00:44] If you ask people right now, most people will say I, a keynote speaker.
[1:00:48] So I speak all over and when I ask people, the word that comes up over and over
[1:00:52] is a sense of horizonlessness, adults.
[1:00:55] Oh, interesting.
[1:00:57] People feel like they have nothing to look forward to right now.
[1:01:01] The human brain needs something to look forward to.
[1:01:04] That's how we're wired, progress and, you know, in always.
[1:01:09] And so right now, there's this sense and it's not just now, it's been for the past several years
[1:01:14] after the pandemic, specifically, and during the pandemic,
[1:01:16] because when it really changed how we sort of think about the future.
[1:01:19] And so we have the sense of like, what's the point?
[1:01:21] What's the point of working hard now?
[1:01:22] What's the point of doing whatever?
[1:01:23] Because it's like, I don't really see a future for myself.
[1:01:26] And so I think that, along with this fragmented attention,
[1:01:31] our loneliness, boredom might be the antidote.
[1:01:35] It's a way to reset your brain and the reason is
[1:01:38] because we are living through this poly crisis, right?
[1:01:41] It's the era of the poly crisis.
[1:01:43] And poly crisis simply means that there's something happening everywhere at all times.
[1:01:47] And we, with our devices, this high tech device that plugs us in everywhere.
[1:01:53] Our brains are getting fed real time on the ground,
[1:01:57] information.
[1:01:58] And so while all of this has evolved, technology now with AI chatbots,
[1:02:02] your amygdala has not.
[1:02:03] And so it feels like when something is happening,
[1:02:06] whether it's far away or close by, your amygdala has that same reaction.
[1:02:09] Now, if you were to not engage in venture by time for procrastination,
[1:02:14] put your phone away and just kind of hang out, maybe drink a cup of herbal tea,
[1:02:18] like old school, play a board game or something,
[1:02:23] or just allow yourself to get bored.
[1:02:25] That hyperactivation, hypervigilance, you might be able to come back down to baseline
[1:02:30] that default mode network will start working in the background.
[1:02:34] You might develop a greater sense of meaning and purpose.
[1:02:37] It's probably today.
[1:02:37] And then life's going to happen to me again and boom, I'm back into it.
[1:02:43] You could create a practice.
[1:02:44] A cultivate of practice.
[1:02:46] You're interviewing neuroscientists.
[1:02:47] And I go, if I still can't crack it,
[1:02:50] and I have all the information and advice and hacks and tips and tricks and resources,
[1:02:55] and I can decide what time I wake up.
[1:02:57] I've got all this privilege.
[1:02:59] And I can't crack it.
[1:03:00] I go, it's going to be really difficult.
[1:03:01] So let me offer a way of thinking about this.
[1:03:04] So in my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis,
[1:03:08] there's a metaphor in there.
[1:03:09] It's about ten ancient ideas, and I use a lot of metaphors to explain ancient ideas about
[1:03:14] psychology and whether they're true.
[1:03:17] The first chapter is on how the mind is divided into parts that often conflict
[1:03:21] like a small rider, which is our conscious reasoning, on a very large elephant,
[1:03:25] which is all the automatic processes that happen.
[1:03:28] That we don't see what's happening.
[1:03:30] We just feel the results intuition and emotion.
[1:03:34] And psychotherapist Tommy, this is a incredibly helpful metaphor with their patients,
[1:03:38] because it explains, and there's a quote from Ovid in there,
[1:03:41] I see the right way and approve it, alas, I follow the wrong.
[1:03:46] So I know I should go to bed, as you say, but yet for some reason,
[1:03:50] I'm not going to bed.
[1:03:51] Because our brains are 500 million years old.
[1:03:53] They work on automatic processes.
[1:03:55] They're animal brains.
[1:03:56] And then very recently, we got language and we can reason things out,
[1:03:59] but the parts that do reasoning don't control behavior.
[1:04:03] And so really, the elephant is what largely guides our behavior, our automatic processes.
[1:04:08] And your phone, as I said before, BF Skinner is in your phone.
[1:04:13] Your phone is a behaviorist training device that trains the elephant.
[1:04:18] And that's why you often do things with your phone that you don't want to do.
[1:04:21] And so, and this is why I'm so insistent,
[1:04:24] that we all have to get all of the slot machine apps off of our phone.
[1:04:29] That is, the original iPhone was an amazing tool.
[1:04:32] It was a Swiss Army knife.
[1:04:34] It had the telephone, a browser, maps, a music player.
[1:04:39] There was a flashlight.
[1:04:40] OK, there was no app store.
[1:04:42] There were no push notifications.
[1:04:43] 2007-2008, it's just a Swiss Army knife.
[1:04:46] There's no problem.
[1:04:48] OK?
[1:04:48] Now, I'm very lucky in that my iPhone has always stayed that.
[1:04:53] I'm always on a computer.
[1:04:54] So my problem, my attention problems are on my computer.
[1:04:56] But my phone, because I never had any addictive apps on it,
[1:05:00] except during the crypto craze where I played around with it and I got hooked.
[1:05:04] And I was checking 50 times a day and I saw the addiction.
[1:05:08] So once I got rid of that and lost all the money that I was willing to lose,
[1:05:12] once I get rid of that, my phone has no addictive power over me.
[1:05:15] Because when I see it, there's no, it's not a slot machine called,
[1:05:18] hey, come back and play, come back and play.
[1:05:20] So your phone right now on your personal device,
[1:05:23] you don't have any social media apps or anything like that?
[1:05:26] I do have Twitter, but I never check it there.
[1:05:28] I never used that on the phone.
[1:05:29] Now, texting an email is a little bit like a slot machine because it's very mild.
[1:05:34] So this is again, this is what works for my students.
[1:05:37] Just get the slot machine apps off your phone and then you'll find
[1:05:41] that then you could even have your phone near you when you go to bed.
[1:05:45] But if you've got addictive apps on your phone, you can't have it when you go to bed.
[1:05:50] Angela Duckworth, the woman who gave us the concept of grit,
[1:05:52] she has this amazing graduation speech at one of the schools in New England.
[1:05:56] And she says something like, where you put your phone at night will
[1:06:00] maybe come the most important decision you make in your life.
[1:06:03] And what she means by that, it's not that, it's, it's, it's,
[1:06:06] if you can use behavioral control and change the stimuli,
[1:06:09] if you can do that, then you're going to be okay.
[1:06:12] But if not, the phone is going to take your attention,
[1:06:14] you're not going to amount to anything.
[1:06:16] All I had to do was bring dump.
[1:06:17] Imagine if you had someone with you all times that could take the ideas you
[1:06:22] have in your head, synthesize them with AI to make them sound better and more
[1:06:26] grammatically correct and write them down for you.
[1:06:29] This is exactly what whisper flow is in my life.
[1:06:32] It is this thought partner that helps me explain what I want to say.
[1:06:35] And it now means that on the go, when I'm alone in my office, when I'm out in a
[1:06:39] bow, I can respond to emails and Slack messages and WhatsApp and everything
[1:06:43] across all of my devices just by speaking.
[1:06:45] I love this tool.
[1:06:46] And I started talking about this in my behind the scenes channel a couple of
[1:06:49] months back and then the founder reached out to me and said,
[1:06:51] we're seeing a lot of people come to our tool because of you.
[1:06:53] So we'd love to be a sponsor.
[1:06:55] We'd love you to be an investor in the company.
[1:06:56] And so I signed up for both of those offers.
[1:06:58] And I'm now an investor and a huge partner in a company called whisper flow.
[1:07:02] You have to check it out.
[1:07:03] Whisper flow is four times faster than typing.
[1:07:06] So if you want to give it a try, head over to whisperflow.ai slash DOAC to get started for free.
[1:07:12] And you can find that link to whisper flow in the description below.
[1:07:17] We asked our audience how many of them thought they were addicted to their
[1:07:22] phone and roughly 85% of respondents, the drivers who would describe themselves as being
[1:07:27] very or completely addicted to their food.
[1:07:30] Very or completely.
[1:07:30] That's very right.
[1:07:31] I didn't realize it would be that high.
[1:07:32] So you can do a test.
[1:07:34] So for people listening, if you want to say like how addicted and by the way,
[1:07:37] we're using the word addiction very loosely in our conversation.
[1:07:40] And so what we're really talking about, because you know, there is in terms of,
[1:07:43] you know, medical, clinical syndrome, when you think about addiction,
[1:07:48] there's certain criteria.
[1:07:49] And so what we're talking about is overuse.
[1:07:51] So overreliance on your device.
[1:07:53] It's responsive overuse that interferes with other domains of life.
[1:07:57] Yes, it interferes.
[1:07:58] And if that is an addiction, I don't know what is.
[1:08:00] And so when you're thinking about, am I addicted to my phone?
[1:08:02] Do I have am I, you know, really what the very simple thing that you can do?
[1:08:06] I did it myself and I was like, I know again, like you, Steven, like,
[1:08:09] know all the science still was really difficult.
[1:08:11] And you have all the access and it was still difficult.
[1:08:14] And so all you have to do is you just take your phone, you put it in another part of your
[1:08:19] house or apartment or whatever and give yourself a couple of hours.
[1:08:22] When you know you're going to be home or you know, you're not reliant on your phone for work
[1:08:26] or whatever.
[1:08:26] Now we're two hours, three hours and just have a piece of paper, old school,
[1:08:30] piece of paper and a pen with you.
[1:08:32] And every time you feel that compulsion of like, I want to check my device,
[1:08:35] you make a mark, you make a mark, you make a mark.
[1:08:37] And just to see, because some people say I'm surprised that your audience at 85%
[1:08:41] because most people would say, I don't know if I'm really addicted.
[1:08:45] And so I like that there's that sense of self-awareness.
[1:08:47] But if you're thinking, yeah, I'm not really that addicted,
[1:08:50] you breathe in an hour, 960 times a minute.
[1:08:54] And you may notice that you want to have that at compulsion to check,
[1:08:58] 960 times a minute or, you know, thereabouts.
[1:09:01] Because we all have that sense of reliance on our devices.
[1:09:04] So that's like a really quick way that you can check to see.
[1:09:09] Am I reliant on my device?
[1:09:10] Are you addicted to your phone under that definition?
[1:09:13] Because of the line of work that I am in, I can very quickly,
[1:09:17] I have certain tells when I know, I call them the canary in the coal mine,
[1:09:21] right? I think we talked about this the last time I was here.
[1:09:23] I can very quickly tell when I'm starting to get that feeling of addiction or compulsion.
[1:09:28] And so I course correct early.
[1:09:31] But that's only because I know the science and I course correct.
[1:09:34] So I keep my, I keep my phone outside.
[1:09:36] I walk the talk. I keep my phone outside my bedroom.
[1:09:39] It is not within arms reach.
[1:09:41] I graced scale my phone during periods of deep focus during the day when I have a deadline.
[1:09:44] I have to get things done.
[1:09:46] And at night, so I avoid revenge by time procrastination.
[1:09:49] But sometimes it happens.
[1:09:50] Like I'm a human, you know, so this past week, not to be a real downer.
[1:09:54] But there have been things that have been in the media the past week that have been
[1:09:57] really challenging, especially as a woman.
[1:09:59] And so I have found myself with the primal urge to scroll.
[1:10:02] My amygdala has been triggered.
[1:10:05] I have been going down rabbit holes.
[1:10:07] And I wouldn't ordinarily do that.
[1:10:08] So I give myself grace too and have a sense of self compassion.
[1:10:12] Do you feel like you're addicted to your phone?
[1:10:14] No, I'm not at all addicted to my phone because I don't have any slot machine apps on it.
[1:10:18] But I really want to question, you made a distinction that many scientists do.
[1:10:22] Which is, well, you know, we can't quite say it's addiction because,
[1:10:25] you know, addiction is certain biochemical pathways based on, you know, heroin and addictive substances.
[1:10:31] But I believe that this is one of the meta talking points that they are able to push that.
[1:10:36] We can't call it addiction. It's different.
[1:10:38] I'm not. I don't mean. I don't mean. I'm sorry.
[1:10:40] And no, I love it. You know, you and I are total allies on this.
[1:10:42] We see the problem where both we're under.
[1:10:44] All I mean is, you know, we're supposed to be very careful at using the word addiction.
[1:10:50] But and you had Anna Lemke on it.
[1:10:52] She was very clear. Like in her practices, now it's overwhelmingly digital addictions.
[1:10:56] It's all of this is working through dopamine.
[1:10:59] If you feel compulsive use, definitely dopamine.
[1:11:01] So it's most of the same brain centers as it is for heroin or crack or any other drug.
[1:11:07] And it's the same effects. That is the it's compulsive use where you don't want to do it.
[1:11:11] You want to change, but yet you find yourself doing it.
[1:11:14] And you have withdrawal effects and people and people have terrible withdrawal effects
[1:11:19] when they're heavy users of these things and they stop.
[1:11:21] And so, you know, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and swims like a duck,
[1:11:26] I'm going to call it a duck.
[1:11:28] In fact, that's what they call it.
[1:11:29] So I just want to read one more quote.
[1:11:31] Again, the quotes are just so astonishing.
[1:11:33] So meta, meta researchers of one of them says quote,
[1:11:37] it seems clear from what's presented here in this internal study
[1:11:41] that some of our users are addicted to our products.
[1:11:44] That's their word addicted to our products.
[1:11:46] And I worry that driving sessions incentivizes us to make our products more addictive
[1:11:51] without providing much more value.
[1:11:53] How to keep someone returning over and over to the same behavior each day?
[1:11:56] Intermittent rewards are most effective.
[1:11:59] Think slot machines, reinforcing behaviors that become especially hard to extinguish,
[1:12:04] even when they provide little reward or cease providing reward at all.
[1:12:09] People, I mean, just imagine an industry that has caused
[1:12:14] 85% of people to feel that they're addicted.
[1:12:18] And not calling it addiction.
[1:12:19] And not calling it addiction.
[1:12:21] And these people, these people are having their lives diminished,
[1:12:26] their relationships diminished.
[1:12:28] So I'm trying to convey is we're seeing the destruction of human capital,
[1:12:32] the destruction of human potential, the destruction of human relationships,
[1:12:36] the destruction of connection, the destruction of sense of meaning.
[1:12:39] At a scale so vast, I don't think people are capable of comprehending it.
[1:12:42] I now believe this is affecting most human beings.
[1:12:46] These industries, these few companies have damaged the lives of most human beings.
[1:12:50] We don't have good data from the developing world,
[1:12:52] but certainly the developed world, wherever kids are going through puberty on touch screens,
[1:12:58] you have this constant fighting over the screens, over the technology.
[1:13:02] And you have these diminishing outcomes, diminishing cognition, diminishing sense of purpose in life.
[1:13:09] Only to get worse with the AI challenge.
[1:13:11] As AI comes in, it's going to get worse.
[1:13:12] Unless we act and we've got to change course in 2026.
[1:13:15] We don't have five years to study it.
[1:13:17] We've got to stop this now in 2026.
[1:13:20] Are you concerned at all about the way education is going for children?
[1:13:23] Oh my god, yes.
[1:13:24] Here's that.
[1:13:26] Ed tech is big tech in a sweater, as they say.
[1:13:30] Because I was almost imagining a future where my future kids are going to learn
[1:13:35] their curriculum from an AI chat box.
[1:13:38] Because now I can imagine the case, cheaper, more personalized, more convenient.
[1:13:43] It's going to know if my son's called Timmy, it's going to know Timmy's brain and it's
[1:13:47] going to know how to make him pay attention and what he's interested in and what he's not.
[1:13:50] So are you concerned about this?
[1:13:52] Where is this a good thing?
[1:13:53] There is definitely a use case for Ed tech.
[1:13:56] If there could be a device that only did math tutoring or only did tutoring,
[1:14:01] and you couldn't watch videos on it, I'm totally open to believing that that can speed up
[1:14:06] teaching.
[1:14:06] But here's what's happened.
[1:14:09] We put computers on everyone's desks around 2014, 2015.
[1:14:13] We used to think in America that it was an equity issue, even back to the 90s.
[1:14:16] The rich kids all have computers.
[1:14:18] The poor kids don't.
[1:14:19] Let's get philanthropists to buy computers for school districts that every kid can have
[1:14:23] a computer on their desk.
[1:14:25] What is a computer?
[1:14:27] It's a play device.
[1:14:28] It does everything.
[1:14:29] Kids use it at home.
[1:14:30] They watch videos.
[1:14:32] They do all sorts of things.
[1:14:33] You put it on their desk and you tell them to do math homework.
[1:14:36] What happens?
[1:14:36] It's mostly short videos.
[1:14:38] That's what research is showing.
[1:14:39] It ends up because they don't block YouTube.
[1:14:41] They might say, oh, we block porn.
[1:14:42] We block video games.
[1:14:43] They can get around all that.
[1:14:45] And if you let them do YouTube, it's YouTube shorts, which is TikTok.
[1:14:48] So what happened to test scores in the United States?
[1:14:51] From the 70s through 2012, they were rising.
[1:14:54] We actually were improving what kids knew, what kids learned in the United States.
[1:14:59] We have very good data, the national, the national assessment of educational progress.
[1:15:03] It goes up till 2012.
[1:15:04] And then by 2015, it starts going down.
[1:15:06] And it's going down before COVID.
[1:15:08] And it goes down more during COVID.
[1:15:10] And everyone thinks like, oh, it's COVID.
[1:15:11] But the peak was 2012.
[1:15:14] And what's happening, what we now can see,
[1:15:17] is that the top students, the very best students who are the ones with executive function,
[1:15:22] they're the ones who can pay attention.
[1:15:23] If you put a computer on that kid's desk, he's not destroyed by it.
[1:15:27] He can actually still learn.
[1:15:29] But the bottom 50% cannot.
[1:15:31] So all of the drop in educational stats is the bottom 50%.
[1:15:35] The bottom 50% in terms of capacity to pay attention,
[1:15:37] their education is being devastated.
[1:15:40] And that's what happened when we put laptops,
[1:15:42] and we put Chromebooks and iPads on their desks.
[1:15:44] We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this stuff.
[1:15:47] And it has damaged education.
[1:15:49] And if we'd spent a quarter of that on teachers,
[1:15:51] we would be in such better shape today.
[1:15:53] So we made a colossal blunder with edtech in the 2010s.
[1:15:58] And now we're about to do the same thing again with AI.
[1:16:00] Again, maybe there are apps.
[1:16:02] Maybe there are applications that would be great.
[1:16:04] But we've got to put the burden of proof on Silicon Valley.
[1:16:07] We've got to say, you guys have to prove that this stuff is effective and safe
[1:16:10] before we let it in.
[1:16:12] We are not going to let you just say,
[1:16:13] hey, let's just flood the zone.
[1:16:14] Let's give it to everybody.
[1:16:16] And then we'll wait 10 years and see what happens.
[1:16:19] I mean, that brings up this study that I have in front of me here,
[1:16:23] which was a 2022 study.
[1:16:26] I mean, unique study, which tested the idea of brain rot,
[1:16:28] which I believe was the Oxford dictionary word of the year, 2024.
[1:16:34] And what they did is they gave 60 participants a test,
[1:16:36] then a 10-minute break,
[1:16:38] and then another test.
[1:16:39] During the break, they either rested or used TikTok Twitter or YouTube.
[1:16:44] And the results showed the following.
[1:16:46] The TikTok group, so they had a 10-minute interval to do anything.
[1:16:49] And this group got TikTok to look at.
[1:16:52] Their memory accuracy dropped from 80% before the break
[1:16:56] to 49% after the break,
[1:16:58] and nearly 40% decline just from a 10-minute break.
[1:17:02] In contrast, the Twitter and YouTube groups
[1:17:04] showed no significant change in the Munich study.
[1:17:06] And there's an image author up on the screen.
[1:17:09] Results from the Munich study showed a 40% drop in perspective memory accuracy
[1:17:14] in the TikTok group after a 10-minute break,
[1:17:16] which is unbelievable.
[1:17:17] Yeah.
[1:17:18] It's unbelievable.
[1:17:19] What the hell is going on there?
[1:17:20] How can a 10-minute TikTok break drop my memory accuracy by 40%?
[1:17:27] TikTok is brain rot.
[1:17:28] What's going on?
[1:17:30] There's so much going on in the brain.
[1:17:31] So when you're thinking about,
[1:17:35] here's the thing.
[1:17:36] Brain breaks are not nice to have.
[1:17:38] They're actually essential for your brain.
[1:17:40] And so we talked a little bit about that default mode network and what happens to it.
[1:17:45] When you're engaging with your devices,
[1:17:47] and that's not a brain break,
[1:17:48] that's activating all of the aspects.
[1:17:50] So it's activating your amygdala.
[1:17:52] It's dampening or decreasing the volume of your prefrontal cortex.
[1:17:56] It's creating that reward system,
[1:17:58] the dopamine hit, those addictive behaviors.
[1:18:01] So it's only when you're thinking about memory planning,
[1:18:04] what was the metric here?
[1:18:06] It was memory, right?
[1:18:07] That was the metric that they were using to study.
[1:18:10] And so when you're thinking about working memory
[1:18:12] or cognitive function, complex problem solving,
[1:18:15] this is all prefrontal cortex.
[1:18:17] And so when you're engaging with TikTok,
[1:18:18] 10 minutes, 5 minutes, whatever it is,
[1:18:21] you are dialing down that biology in your brain.
[1:18:24] And so of course you're going to see changes,
[1:18:27] and you're going to see the flip side,
[1:18:30] increase hypervigilance, irritability,
[1:18:32] distractability, fragmented attention.
[1:18:35] It's just, again, this is not to say that
[1:18:37] this whole conversation, right,
[1:18:38] or when you're reading studies,
[1:18:39] you might say to yourself,
[1:18:41] what's wrong with me?
[1:18:42] You know, is there something wrong with me?
[1:18:43] Is my brain broken?
[1:18:45] Am I weak?
[1:18:46] It is not you.
[1:18:47] You are not alone.
[1:18:48] It is not your fault.
[1:18:49] It is the biology of your brain doing exactly as it should.
[1:18:53] So we talked about the amygdala and prefrontal cortex here.
[1:18:56] Your amygdala is not wrong or broken.
[1:18:58] It's by design,
[1:18:59] supposed to think about your immediate needs,
[1:19:02] survival, self-preservation.
[1:19:04] And so when you're on the algorithm,
[1:19:06] we know we talked about, you know, certain,
[1:19:08] or maybe we didn't talk about it,
[1:19:10] certain content that you see on TikTok
[1:19:12] and others that is when it's reactionary,
[1:19:16] you know, words like FOMO or RAGEBATE.
[1:19:18] These are not neutral terms.
[1:19:20] When you're engaging with these social media platforms,
[1:19:23] it's not something neutral, it's not passive,
[1:19:25] it is an active biological process in your brain.
[1:19:27] So this study, it's not surprising.
[1:19:30] It is actually exactly what you would expect
[1:19:32] to happen to your biology
[1:19:34] if you had this sort of what we call in medicine
[1:19:37] and this kind of intervention.
[1:19:39] It's stimulating exactly what it's supposed to do.
[1:19:41] Yeah, I'll just add on to what Dididi said
[1:19:44] that there are some, there are many medical conditions
[1:19:48] where you can't just go to the patient and say,
[1:19:50] why do you think you got this cancer?
[1:19:53] Oh, I think it's because I ate a lot of chocolate
[1:19:55] when I was, whatever.
[1:19:56] You know, when the act is separated from the effect
[1:20:01] by 30 years, then you don't expect the patients
[1:20:04] to have insight into the cause of it.
[1:20:06] But when the outcome is separated from the input by seconds
[1:20:11] and you have literally millions of chances
[1:20:14] to observe the covariation, the patient is really, really accurate.
[1:20:19] In fact, the patient really knows what's going on.
[1:20:21] And so I think the deciding factor here
[1:20:23] on this big debate about, oh, is it just correlation
[1:20:26] or is it causation?
[1:20:28] The deciding factor for social media
[1:20:30] and for a lot of these tech innovations,
[1:20:32] including video games and gambling and all of that,
[1:20:34] should really be the kids.
[1:20:36] And if the kids say, this is bad for me,
[1:20:38] we should take their word for it.
[1:20:40] Given that we also have correlational studies,
[1:20:42] random control trials, longitudinal studies,
[1:20:45] I mean, we have so much other data.
[1:20:48] But given that the kids themselves, they call it brain rot.
[1:20:51] They call them material brain rot.
[1:20:53] My students tell me it's a huge obstacle
[1:20:55] to them doing their homework.
[1:20:56] As one of them said, I pull out a book, I read a sentence,
[1:20:59] I get bored, I go to TikTok.
[1:21:02] So if they're telling us that this is damaging
[1:21:04] their ability to pay attention, they feel it,
[1:21:05] they feel the loss, we all feel it.
[1:21:08] Many of us have noticed this.
[1:21:11] Then I think this is pretty decisive evidence
[1:21:13] that this stuff is bad for cognition.
[1:21:16] And it has long-term consequences.
[1:21:18] So it's not just that in the moment, right?
[1:21:20] So there was this case that was all over the media,
[1:21:23] a college student.
[1:21:24] I'm sure you're familiar with the case,
[1:21:26] and this young woman was on TikTok,
[1:21:29] experiencing brain rot,
[1:21:30] and then some TikTok algorithm took her down
[1:21:33] to this place of, you know, you should take an edible.
[1:21:36] It'll help you.
[1:21:37] So you can go to class and you could go to class
[1:21:41] and you could, you know, be more alert.
[1:21:43] And so she did that.
[1:21:44] And then it continued on and on,
[1:21:46] and then she developed a dependence on edibles.
[1:21:50] And then checked into rehab.
[1:21:52] And only when she focused on analog activities
[1:21:56] like guitar playing and a couple of other things
[1:21:59] that she started doing is when, and, you know,
[1:22:02] removing the stimulus, the TikTok algorithm
[1:22:06] is when she started to improve.
[1:22:08] So it's not just in the moment,
[1:22:09] oh, I can't remember something,
[1:22:11] or I'm more irritable,
[1:22:12] these sorts of things compound
[1:22:14] and the long-term sequelae or the long-term effects
[1:22:18] can be quite damaging.
[1:22:19] That's just one example.
[1:22:21] In your book, then, Anxious Generation,
[1:22:23] Jonathan News, that the subtitle here is,
[1:22:25] how the great rewiring of childhood
[1:22:27] is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
[1:22:29] And I was looking at some of these graphs
[1:22:31] of different sort of mental illness illnesses.
[1:22:34] And they're increasing.
[1:22:35] One of them that's increasing is ADHD.
[1:22:40] I was diagnosed with ADHD, maybe about a year ago.
[1:22:44] And when we're talking about short attention spans,
[1:22:47] I mean, the name attention deficit
[1:22:50] hyperactivity disorder, I believe that's what it's called,
[1:22:52] sounds a lot like what we're talking about.
[1:22:55] Is there a link, do you believe,
[1:22:58] between the increasing diagnoses of ADHD
[1:23:02] and the sort of frying of our brains
[1:23:03] with short form video and social media?
[1:23:07] Yeah, I mean, I suspect that there is,
[1:23:08] but here's what I can tell you,
[1:23:09] I learned while writing the book.
[1:23:11] I looked to see if there were studies indicating
[1:23:14] that heavy use of social media and video games
[1:23:19] and all the electronic stuff caused ADHD.
[1:23:22] And when I was doing the research in 2023,
[1:23:23] I did not find evidence that it will give a kid ADHD,
[1:23:26] ADHD, who otherwise wouldn't have it.
[1:23:28] And what I did find was evidence that for kids who have ADHD,
[1:23:31] when you let them have the devices,
[1:23:33] the video games, all that, their symptoms get much worse.
[1:23:35] And so because it is a major achievement
[1:23:38] of young adulthood to be able to pay attention,
[1:23:41] to develop what we've been calling executive function,
[1:23:44] to be able to make a plan and decide,
[1:23:45] oh, to reach the plan, I have to do this,
[1:23:48] and then I do this.
[1:23:49] And then it might be a long time before I get here,
[1:23:51] but I will keep going and I will keep my eye on the prize.
[1:23:54] That, I assume that's, you're saying it's a little harder
[1:23:57] for you to do that.
[1:23:57] I mean, that's what ADHD means.
[1:23:59] How do you experience ADHD?
[1:24:00] Well, well, I death, I mean, if I think about school,
[1:24:06] I couldn't pay attention in school for very long.
[1:24:09] And that meant that I was always in the expulsion room
[1:24:12] and then I was expelled.
[1:24:13] And then that's kind of, I feel like it's got worse as an adult.
[1:24:17] From my, in my opinion, my relationship with my phone
[1:24:20] has made it much worse, where really, I can't,
[1:24:23] I can't pay attention to many things for a very long time.
[1:24:26] The exception to this is I can do deep work
[1:24:31] for many, many hours without me thinking.
[1:24:33] It's almost a bit of a question.
[1:24:34] When you are extremely motivated.
[1:24:35] When you're really into it, you can be into it.
[1:24:38] That's right.
[1:24:39] But a lot of work isn't that.
[1:24:40] A lot of being effective in the workplace
[1:24:42] is not your following your passion.
[1:24:44] Right, ADHD kids, they can zoom in
[1:24:47] because they're getting the dopamine,
[1:24:49] they're getting the dopamine from this thing.
[1:24:50] But a lot of work isn't like that.
[1:24:53] And these kids are not going to be able to do that.
[1:24:54] So actually, what you said, it fits perfectly
[1:24:56] with what I found from those Dutch studies.
[1:24:57] If you did have whether it's a genetic
[1:24:59] or whatever the predisposition is,
[1:25:02] this environment has made your symptoms worse.
[1:25:04] And of course, ADHD kids can be incredibly creative.
[1:25:07] They are often very, very successful.
[1:25:09] But my fear is that the pathways to success
[1:25:12] that they used to take might be blocked.
[1:25:14] If they basically are just scrolling all day long
[1:25:17] and not able to have real life experiences.
[1:25:20] And relationships are like that, especially romantic ones.
[1:25:22] It's an interesting thing that you bring up, Stephen,
[1:25:25] because there is an increase in adult onset.
[1:25:28] You know, when adults are diagnosed with ADHD,
[1:25:31] because typically we think of ADHD as a pediatric condition
[1:25:34] or young adults.
[1:25:34] And so increasingly, we're seeing more and more
[1:25:37] adults who are in their 30s and 40s, 50s sometimes,
[1:25:40] even 60s who are being diagnosed,
[1:25:42] newly diagnosed with ADHD.
[1:25:44] And so that's an interesting, there's so many, you know,
[1:25:47] reasons like it might be that they had it all along
[1:25:51] and they were diagnosed.
[1:25:52] And so what is going on there?
[1:25:53] That would be a future podcast episode
[1:25:56] for an ADHD expert of, you know, what are the drivers
[1:26:00] of why are so many adults being diagnosed with ADHD?
[1:26:03] Or maybe even just the symptoms looking very similar.
[1:26:07] Yeah, that's right.
[1:26:08] You talk about popcorn brain, ADT.
[1:26:10] Yeah. So, you know, we've talked about brain rot
[1:26:13] and the primal urge to scroll.
[1:26:14] And popcorn brain is kind of an offshoot.
[1:26:16] It's part of the same family.
[1:26:17] And so what happens is it's a term coined by a man,
[1:26:20] a psychologist named David Levy.
[1:26:23] And what happens with popcorn brain is that you,
[1:26:26] and we all have it.
[1:26:28] And so what it is, a cytophonominant
[1:26:30] when you spend too much time online
[1:26:32] and you are overstimulated.
[1:26:34] And so it is hard for you to spend time offline.
[1:26:36] Offline feels slow, boring,
[1:26:39] because things are moving at a much slower pace.
[1:26:41] And so popcorn brain is the sensation of your brain popping.
[1:26:44] It is not actively popping.
[1:26:46] It's not like your brain cells are popping,
[1:26:48] but it sure feels like it.
[1:26:50] And so your primal urge to scroll kind of primes your brain
[1:26:53] to develop popcorn brain.
[1:26:54] You are more at risk for developing popcorn brain
[1:26:57] when you feel a sense of stress
[1:26:58] because of that primal urge to scroll.
[1:27:00] The differentiator between brain rot
[1:27:02] and popcorn brain again,
[1:27:03] these are societal terms that we're calling
[1:27:06] for a constellation or a group of symptoms, right?
[1:27:09] And so the difference to me is that popcorn brain is ubiquitous.
[1:27:13] It's everywhere.
[1:27:14] It's like we all have it
[1:27:16] and it's happening all the time
[1:27:18] because of the modern age
[1:27:20] and a lot of the things that we talked about.
[1:27:22] Brain rot is a little bit more specific.
[1:27:24] It's a little bit more well-defined.
[1:27:26] So it has certain features.
[1:27:27] Like we call it the biopsychosocial model
[1:27:30] when you're thinking about a particular medical
[1:27:33] or condition or entity.
[1:27:34] So what are the biological factors
[1:27:35] we talked about?
[1:27:36] What defines brain rot?
[1:27:38] It's a change in brain waves,
[1:27:40] a change in brain regions,
[1:27:41] the migdala lighting up
[1:27:43] and the prefrontal cortex kind of being quiet.
[1:27:46] Psychological factors we talked about,
[1:27:48] attention, complex problem solving, impulse control,
[1:27:53] and then the social factors, loneliness and others.
[1:27:56] So compulsion.
[1:27:58] And so I would say popcorn brain is something
[1:28:01] that we all suffer from.
[1:28:03] And brain rot is something that is very specific.
[1:28:07] The other thing that we haven't talked about
[1:28:08] that I would love to kind of,
[1:28:10] because so much of our conversation
[1:28:11] is like doom and gloom, right?
[1:28:12] It's like, won't, won't, won't.
[1:28:14] One thing that I would like to say is that,
[1:28:16] as bad as, when you hear the term brain rot,
[1:28:20] it seems permanent because rot,
[1:28:23] it connotes like deterioration.
[1:28:25] That's it.
[1:28:26] It's one side, it is one way and that's it.
[1:28:27] But in fact popcorn brain and brain rot
[1:28:30] are reversible conditions.
[1:28:32] So it is not in adults.
[1:28:34] If you've gone through puberty with it,
[1:28:36] it's not so clear.
[1:28:37] Yes, in adults and my work focuses on adults.
[1:28:41] And so when you have, if you experience brain rot
[1:28:43] in your 30s, 40s and beyond,
[1:28:45] you can, it takes time, it takes eight weeks
[1:28:49] for your brain to rewire itself,
[1:28:50] give yourself time, a sense of self compassion
[1:28:53] is really important.
[1:28:54] But you can, there is a sense of it being able
[1:28:57] to be reversed.
[1:28:58] So it's not so much a brain.
[1:29:00] It's not a fixed trait, but rather a brain state.
[1:29:03] So I think it's important to offer that hope.
[1:29:04] What is an adult brain, what age is an adult brain?
[1:29:06] Well, age is my brain stopped growing
[1:29:08] in the way where it's reversible.
[1:29:10] So yeah, traditionally, it was thought that,
[1:29:15] puberty is the period of super rapid brain change
[1:29:17] and that begins early teens, sometimes even before 10.
[1:29:21] And is mostly over by sort of mid to late teens.
[1:29:24] But then the prefrontal cortex,
[1:29:26] which Aditi was talking about,
[1:29:27] which is so important for impulse control
[1:29:29] and executive function, that doesn't finish myelinating.
[1:29:32] Myelin is sort of the neuron that you get
[1:29:35] of sort of a fatty sheath, like an insulation
[1:29:36] that sort of locks down the circuits
[1:29:38] and makes them more efficient.
[1:29:40] That doesn't stop until around age 25
[1:29:43] is what we've always said for many years.
[1:29:44] But you're telling me that there's new research showing
[1:29:46] that it sells about that.
[1:29:47] So you know, all this time, right?
[1:29:49] We've always said that the prefrontal cortex
[1:29:51] is fully forms and fully functional at the age of 25.
[1:29:54] And so when you're talking about impulse control
[1:29:55] and all of this stuff,
[1:29:56] that they're just really interesting study.
[1:29:58] I'll send it to you.
[1:29:59] It looked at, I think it was 1,000 people from age zero.
[1:30:04] So birth all the way to 90.
[1:30:06] So the entire population.
[1:30:09] And it found five, it looked at lifespan
[1:30:13] and said they're actually five stages.
[1:30:14] So first just childhood up, zero to age nine.
[1:30:17] During this time, your brain is not very efficient,
[1:30:21] but it's really growing and it's growing and changing,
[1:30:24] but it's not really efficient.
[1:30:25] Nine to 32 is considered adolescence.
[1:30:30] And so, you know, 32 is when adolescence ends,
[1:30:33] apparently, according to the theory.
[1:30:34] But it'd be a sort of graph.
[1:30:35] I mean, you're most of the way done by 25,
[1:30:37] but there's still some flexibility even after that.
[1:30:40] And then the next stage is from 33 to I think 63.
[1:30:46] 66 is like adulthood.
[1:30:49] Things are very stable.
[1:30:50] Learning is stable and, you know, it's efficient
[1:30:54] and it's, it, things are doing well.
[1:30:57] And then 60, yeah, 66 to about 83 is early aging.
[1:31:02] And so that's when you see some of the age related changes.
[1:31:05] And then 83 plus is late aging.
[1:31:08] So that kind of main finding was that, you know,
[1:31:12] it was all over the news.
[1:31:13] It was like adolescence goes until 32.
[1:31:17] So I'm 33, some on that.
[1:31:19] One year, one year out.
[1:31:21] I'm coached by number, yeah.
[1:31:23] When you wrote this book, Jonathan, the anxious generation,
[1:31:25] it, um, it's had a big impact on the world in a way
[1:31:28] that I think any author might dream of.
[1:31:30] And I know this in part because, you know,
[1:31:32] I set on this podcast, interviewing really interesting people
[1:31:34] all the time.
[1:31:34] And even this morning, when I did an interview across town
[1:31:38] with James Exton, he talked about this book twice.
[1:31:41] And, you know, laws have been changed around the world
[1:31:44] inspired by this book.
[1:31:45] And we're actually seeing an increase of laws in the UK.
[1:31:48] I mean, Australia just banned, I think, social media,
[1:31:50] if I've changed 16, yeah.
[1:31:52] You met with Macron, right?
[1:31:54] Yeah, yeah.
[1:31:56] Could you ever have imagined?
[1:31:57] And actually, what does the success of this book say?
[1:32:00] Yeah, about society.
[1:32:02] No, thank you for that question.
[1:32:04] Because, you know, I do tend to get, you know, as you've heard,
[1:32:07] I mean, I'm extremely alarmed about these trends.
[1:32:08] And these are gigantic threats beyond what anyone can imagine.
[1:32:12] But here's the amazing thing is that we can reverse this
[1:32:16] for almost no money.
[1:32:18] And it's completely bipartisan.
[1:32:20] And it's not that hard to do.
[1:32:22] And we're doing it.
[1:32:24] And so what happened was, you know, I wrote the book
[1:32:26] as an American, assuming that we don't have a functioning
[1:32:29] legislature, the Congress can be stopped,
[1:32:31] we have a vitocracy, the social media companies
[1:32:33] can stop anything in the house.
[1:32:35] So I wrote this, assuming, you know,
[1:32:36] we'll never get legislation.
[1:32:38] So we have to do this on our own.
[1:32:39] And I proposed four norms, no smartphone before high school
[1:32:42] and no social media before 16, phone free schools,
[1:32:45] and far more independence replay responsibility
[1:32:46] in the real world.
[1:32:48] We can try to do this with collective action locally
[1:32:50] at the school level.
[1:32:52] Two things that surprised me.
[1:32:54] One, are that immediately governors
[1:32:57] from red states and blue states started reaching out to me.
[1:32:59] Our states actually function.
[1:33:01] Our states have governments that are accountable to the people
[1:33:03] that are trying to get good results.
[1:33:04] And so this has been a totally bipartisan issue.
[1:33:07] Sarah Huckabee Sanders from Arkansas
[1:33:08] was one of the very first, Kathy Hoko also.
[1:33:11] And it is, it tends to be more female legislators
[1:33:14] and governors or spouses of heads of state.
[1:33:17] The mom's, the book really spoke to moms
[1:33:19] because moms around the world,
[1:33:21] they felt the kids being pulled away.
[1:33:22] I believe they felt it viscerally more than the dads did.
[1:33:26] Also the dads kind of like the video games.
[1:33:27] They're a little more protect.
[1:33:29] So I think the moms felt the pain more
[1:33:31] and took it more personally.
[1:33:32] So when the book came out,
[1:33:33] mothers around the world jumped into action,
[1:33:35] formed groups pushed for legislation
[1:33:38] and changes began happening.
[1:33:40] What I just, I was just, I was in Davos
[1:33:42] and then London and Brussels two weeks ago.
[1:33:45] And what I saw was a complete sea change
[1:33:49] in the world's thinking about how we need
[1:33:52] to have age limits on social media and other tech.
[1:33:54] And here's what I think just happened.
[1:33:55] It's so cool, it just dawned on me.
[1:33:57] Literally why I was in London,
[1:33:58] like I was pushing on open doors everywhere.
[1:34:01] Wherever I went, people wanted to do this.
[1:34:02] I went to the EU, they want to do this.
[1:34:04] Like what is happening?
[1:34:06] And what I realized is this,
[1:34:07] Stephen Pinker has a book out last year called
[1:34:10] when everyone knows that everyone knows.
[1:34:13] It's about the immediate change in a social system
[1:34:16] when private knowledge, everybody knows
[1:34:19] that the emperor has no clothes.
[1:34:21] Everybody knows that this ideology doesn't work.
[1:34:24] Everybody knows that, but they don't all know
[1:34:27] that everybody else knows it
[1:34:29] and that everybody else knows that.
[1:34:30] And so in the emperor's new clothes,
[1:34:32] everybody thought he's, I don't think he has any clothes on,
[1:34:35] but maybe only wise people can see it.
[1:34:38] But when the child says, the emperor has no clothes.
[1:34:41] And then in the Hans Christian Anderson story,
[1:34:43] it says, and the people began whispering to each other.
[1:34:47] And then they all cried out in unison.
[1:34:49] And that's what happened when Australia's law went into effect.
[1:34:52] So I believe that a December 10th of last December
[1:34:56] was the global turning point in the battle to reclaim childhood.
[1:35:00] And if we reclaim that, we move on to our attention
[1:35:02] and adult life as well.
[1:35:04] What happened on December 10th?
[1:35:06] The Australia law went into effect.
[1:35:08] Sky didn't fall.
[1:35:09] People weren't locked out of their accounts.
[1:35:12] All the companies comply.
[1:35:13] They shut down five million accounts
[1:35:16] for Australia's three and a half million kids
[1:35:18] that were underage, two and a half million kids.
[1:35:21] The sky didn't fall.
[1:35:22] And there's a lot of news coverage
[1:35:23] around the world of what Australia was doing.
[1:35:25] And a lot of the news coverage included opinions
[1:35:28] from the writer saying, why can't we do that?
[1:35:31] Hey, let's do that here.
[1:35:33] And when everybody saw that everybody was looking at Australia
[1:35:36] and saying, let's do that here, then everybody knew
[1:35:39] that everybody knew that this is just completely bonkers
[1:35:42] to have children being raised on social media platforms
[1:35:44] talking with anonymous strangers
[1:35:46] and being fed algorithmically curated garbage.
[1:35:49] So I believe that that's why 2026 is going to be the year
[1:35:54] when at least 15 countries are going to commit
[1:35:56] to passing an age minimal law.
[1:35:59] In 2025 it was one, Australia.
[1:36:02] And now we already have Indonesia.
[1:36:04] Their law goes into effect in March.
[1:36:06] I met with Macron in Davos and a few days he was preparing
[1:36:10] to push a bill through the assembly and he got it.
[1:36:13] He's the first in the EU, but a lot of other countries
[1:36:15] in the EU are going to follow.
[1:36:16] The whole EU was likely to do it.
[1:36:18] So yes, I am incredibly alarmed
[1:36:22] about how big this problem is.
[1:36:24] But I'm incredibly inspired that the whole world
[1:36:27] is rising up to do something about it.
[1:36:29] We actually can control our fate.
[1:36:31] And that was not clear before December 10th.
[1:36:35] Bravo.
[1:36:36] As a mother, that was the first thing I said to you.
[1:36:38] The first thing I said to you was thank you
[1:36:41] as a mom for changing my family's life.
[1:36:45] Thank you, Lily.
[1:36:49] It's a really special accomplishment, Jonathan.
[1:36:52] You know, there's no real words that I could say
[1:36:54] that could quite capture the long-term impact
[1:36:57] that that's going to have on billions of people's lives.
[1:37:01] I'm not just the direct, but also the indirect.
[1:37:04] In all the ways we've described their ability to form connections,
[1:37:08] to fall in love, to find meaning and purpose in their lives
[1:37:10] and their neuroscience and therefore the neuroscience
[1:37:13] of their children and their children's children and so on.
[1:37:17] So it's a really, it's a really overwhelming accomplishment.
[1:37:22] It was a bizarre situation that I walked into
[1:37:26] with the unique abilities of a social psychologist.
[1:37:29] That is, everybody was upset about this, everybody could see it,
[1:37:32] but they thought, well, this is my problem
[1:37:34] or in my family we have this problem.
[1:37:36] And I came to this with fresh eyes.
[1:37:39] My dissertation was on moral development.
[1:37:41] I studied adolescent behavior longer ago in my career
[1:37:43] and I've written a battered on my book.
[1:37:44] So it wasn't totally new to me.
[1:37:46] But I came into the field of social media studies around 2018, 2019.
[1:37:50] I really immersed myself in it.
[1:37:52] And it was like, you know, you walk in and immediately you see,
[1:37:56] wait, this is a trap.
[1:37:57] People are on it because people are on it.
[1:37:59] And the kids are complaining about that.
[1:38:01] Everyone's complaining about it.
[1:38:02] And the only reason they can't get off
[1:38:04] is because everyone else is on it.
[1:38:05] So I think I was able to see that
[1:38:08] and then also COVID confused us for a few years.
[1:38:11] So it wasn't until COVID was in the rear view mirror
[1:38:14] that it was possible for everybody to say,
[1:38:15] wait, this is crazy.
[1:38:17] And so I was incredibly lucky in terms of the timing.
[1:38:20] My book happened to come out in March of 2024
[1:38:23] just as the world was ready to see like, wait,
[1:38:25] what have we done to our kids?
[1:38:26] Let's undo it.
[1:38:28] And you said you're now focusing more on short form video.
[1:38:31] So yes, so in studying older Gen Z,
[1:38:35] these are the people who went through puberty on Instagram.
[1:38:39] I should, if I could just lay out that it's very important
[1:38:40] to get the timing that everyone understands the timing
[1:38:42] because this is what you mentioned the polycrisis before.
[1:38:45] The polycrisis I believe begins between 2010 and 2015.
[1:38:48] Here's why.
[1:38:49] So we've had the internet for a long time.
[1:38:50] And it was marvelous.
[1:38:51] We love the internet in the 90s.
[1:38:53] It's going to be the best friend of democracy
[1:38:56] and then the iPhone comes out and it's amazing.
[1:38:57] Oh my God, there's so many things.
[1:38:59] Everything seems great.
[1:39:01] Okay, so in 2010,
[1:39:04] most of almost all of us have flip phones.
[1:39:05] The iPhone's spreading,
[1:39:06] but it's still mostly flip phones.
[1:39:08] Teens are all on flip phones, basic phones.
[1:39:10] And we call those people millennials.
[1:39:11] If you finished puberty by 20,
[1:39:14] if you were born in say 1990,
[1:39:16] and you start puberty in 2002,
[1:39:19] you're done by 2008.
[1:39:21] So in there, if you got through puberty
[1:39:24] before you got on Instagram, you're a millennial.
[1:39:26] Whereas if you're born after 1995,
[1:39:29] but let's say if you're born into your 2000,
[1:39:31] you begin puberty in 2012.
[1:39:34] And you're not done until 2016, 2018.
[1:39:39] So in 2010, everyone has a flip phone
[1:39:41] with no front facing camera, no high speed internet.
[1:39:44] You have to pay for your tech.
[1:39:45] So you use it to call people and to text them.
[1:39:48] And that's it.
[1:39:49] It was a communication device.
[1:39:51] And that's why the millennials have good mental health.
[1:39:53] They are the last mentally healthy and successful generation.
[1:39:57] But if you're Gen Z, you got 2012 is the year
[1:40:01] that now most people now have a smartphone.
[1:40:04] It's the year that Facebook buys Instagram.
[1:40:07] They don't change it at first,
[1:40:08] but that's the other, all the girls go on it.
[1:40:10] Everyone now has high speed data,
[1:40:12] front facing camera came out in 2010.
[1:40:14] So by 2015, we're in a radically different world.
[1:40:18] For children's development,
[1:40:19] it's now radically different,
[1:40:21] much more hostile to human development.
[1:40:23] And that's what we did to Gen Z
[1:40:24] and now we're doing to Gen Alpha.
[1:40:27] For politics, it was crazy for all sorts of reasons
[1:40:30] in every decade.
[1:40:31] And especially in the early 2000s,
[1:40:34] there's a culture we're going on,
[1:40:35] there's all kinds of stuff going on.
[1:40:36] But it was when everyone has,
[1:40:40] really Twitter was the biggest perpetrator of this.
[1:40:42] When everyone has Twitter and everyone's checking all the time
[1:40:44] and anything can blow up,
[1:40:46] you describe the way there was variance on TikTok.
[1:40:50] If you get it just right,
[1:40:51] it can blow up, you can have huge impact.
[1:40:54] That's when the democracy is a conversation.
[1:40:57] When it moved from newspapers and, you know,
[1:41:00] even simple web bulletin boards,
[1:41:03] when it moved to super viral retweet buttons, all of that,
[1:41:06] that's all 2010 to 2015.
[1:41:09] So that's why since then,
[1:41:11] everything has been insane
[1:41:12] and it's going to just keep getting more insane.
[1:41:14] And that's why I believe we have this poly crisis
[1:41:17] because there's more to it.
[1:41:19] It's not just the technology,
[1:41:20] but I believe the transformation of our connection
[1:41:24] and our information flow and our addiction,
[1:41:27] all of that is radically different by 2015
[1:41:29] compared to how it was in 2010.
[1:41:31] And now everything else builds on top of that.
[1:41:33] I believe, what do you think?
[1:41:34] Do you think that makes sense?
[1:41:35] I think there's one more data point to add
[1:41:37] in that 2014 was the year that things really,
[1:41:41] was the tipping point, like you say.
[1:41:42] Yes, yes, that's the year that I point to, too, yes.
[1:41:44] Yes, so before,
[1:41:46] what do you point to?
[1:41:46] So when you look at the data,
[1:41:48] you see that time spent alone,
[1:41:51] when you compare, when you look at data
[1:41:53] from like the 1960s to 2014,
[1:41:56] it was kind of stable, Americans spending time alone,
[1:41:59] spending time with friends, kind of the same, right?
[1:42:03] So people spent kind of same amount of time
[1:42:04] with friends, same amount of time alone
[1:42:06] over those decades.
[1:42:08] 2014 marks a shift
[1:42:10] and there is a steep rise in time spent alone
[1:42:16] and a drop in time spent with friends.
[1:42:18] And so what happens in 2014?
[1:42:21] It is when the majority of Americans get a smartphone.
[1:42:26] And it's not to say, again, we've said,
[1:42:28] causality, correlation, which is it,
[1:42:30] but there is like, based on everything
[1:42:32] that we've talked about, my gosh,
[1:42:34] is there an association between that?
[1:42:36] This is not to say that time spent alone,
[1:42:39] when I share this data, people may say,
[1:42:41] but I like spending time alone.
[1:42:42] I'm not lonely, I'm okay.
[1:42:44] This is not about being an introvert or an extrovert.
[1:42:46] It's not about, you know, you can have solitude
[1:42:49] and feel great and you're not lonely,
[1:42:51] but we are human beings and we are social creatures.
[1:42:54] This is just how we are built evolutionarily.
[1:42:57] And so that is a real red flag
[1:43:01] when you have this big jump in time spent alone,
[1:43:05] very much the same year.
[1:43:07] And so my work focuses on adults,
[1:43:09] Jonathan, on kids, but there's this, you know,
[1:43:12] that's the moment, right?
[1:43:13] 2014 where everything changed.
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[1:45:26] So what do we do about this?
[1:45:28] Because when I look at all the stats,
[1:45:30] all these audience surveys ahead of this,
[1:45:32] people are spending roughly an audience
[1:45:34] of our six and a half hours a day on their phones.
[1:45:37] Short-form videos are only gonna get more addictive.
[1:45:39] AI's gonna know me more, it's gonna be more personalized.
[1:45:41] The content is gonna be generated just for me.
[1:45:44] What's next?
[1:45:46] Is it a law we need to pass?
[1:45:47] Is it something I need to do myself?
[1:45:50] So I think we need to pick the low-hanging fruit first.
[1:45:53] And the reason for that is not just efficiency.
[1:45:56] It's that we have to prove that we can actually do something.
[1:45:58] Because we've never done anything.
[1:45:59] We've never done anything to restrain this.
[1:46:01] We've let Silicon Valley run wild.
[1:46:03] Congress gave them special protection.
[1:46:05] Section 230, nobody can sue them for killing their kids.
[1:46:08] If they feed them content, they can't be held responsible.
[1:46:11] I think Section 230 is probably something worth explaining.
[1:46:13] Sure.
[1:46:14] The Communications Decency Act 1997,
[1:46:17] I think it was Pledge of Medicine here.
[1:46:19] There's a section in it that the goal was to specifically
[1:46:22] let the tech companies like AOL back then,
[1:46:26] let them take down pornographic content.
[1:46:28] Because they were afraid, if we take down anything,
[1:46:30] then we're responsible for everything.
[1:46:31] And now it's gonna be endless.
[1:46:33] So Congress specifically said, don't worry, don't worry.
[1:46:36] If you choose to take something down,
[1:46:38] nobody can sue you for what you leave up.
[1:46:40] So it was a good intention originally.
[1:46:42] But the courts have interpreted it so widely
[1:46:44] as to say, no one can regulate social media.
[1:46:46] They're not responsible for hurting kids.
[1:46:48] You can't sue them.
[1:46:49] And they have never faced a jury.
[1:46:51] They have never, no parent has ever gotten justice
[1:46:53] from them despite all the kids whose lives have been run
[1:46:55] all the kids are dead.
[1:46:56] And that's gonna change.
[1:46:57] That's changing just now here in February in Los Angeles.
[1:47:01] So because the US Congress sort of set up this problem.
[1:47:05] And it also in a different law said,
[1:47:07] how old does a kid have to be
[1:47:09] before a company can take their data
[1:47:11] without their parents' knowledge or permission,
[1:47:13] before a company can expose them to all kinds of stuff,
[1:47:15] before a company can have them sign away the rights.
[1:47:17] How old?
[1:47:18] And the original law said, 16, let's try 16.
[1:47:21] Because it wasn't so sick and twisted back then, 1998,
[1:47:25] caught by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
[1:47:27] So, but various law being, they pushed it down
[1:47:30] from 16 to 13 and they gutted enforcement.
[1:47:32] So as long as, and that's why all over the internet,
[1:47:34] it's, are you 13?
[1:47:36] Or what's your birth year?
[1:47:37] And as long as you're 13, you're in.
[1:47:40] For porn and you have to say you're 18.
[1:47:42] So because we, the, it's a few laws that set this up,
[1:47:45] we definitely need laws to undo it, especially for kids.
[1:47:48] What I'm advocating is, let's do the easy stuff,
[1:47:51] the high impact stuff for kids,
[1:47:53] because that is totally not politically controversial.
[1:47:56] There is no left right divide on that.
[1:47:58] And that's been true everywhere.
[1:47:59] Australia, Britain, the EU, everywhere.
[1:48:02] Regulating the internet for adults,
[1:48:05] and regulating social media for its destructive properties
[1:48:08] and democracy is a hell of a lot harder.
[1:48:10] And I don't have easy answers.
[1:48:12] There's a lot we could do to reduce the virality,
[1:48:14] the spread of, of the extreme, so there are lots
[1:48:17] of little things that we can do.
[1:48:18] And Francis Howigan, the Facebook whistle
[1:48:20] or had all kinds of ideas.
[1:48:21] So we definitely can do things to make it less toxic
[1:48:24] for democracy, but those are going to be politically
[1:48:26] controversial, because one side is going to benefit
[1:48:28] from more than the other.
[1:48:29] So that's going to be very difficult to do.
[1:48:30] I don't know if we can do them in the US.
[1:48:32] But let's just all protect the kids.
[1:48:36] That way we show globally that we actually can do something.
[1:48:40] And if we do that, then I think we will be able to do some
[1:48:43] basic things about AI, like no companion chat bots
[1:48:46] if you're under 18.
[1:48:48] These things already have a body count.
[1:48:49] A lot of kids have been encouraged to kill themselves.
[1:48:51] They already have driven hundreds of thousands
[1:48:53] or millions of people into psychosis.
[1:48:55] So we'll be able to, I believe, put some limits on AI,
[1:48:59] especially for kids.
[1:49:01] But if we can't get this, if we can't
[1:49:03] wait on social media for kids, then I
[1:49:04] don't think we have any chance to regulate AI.
[1:49:06] It's going to be much more difficult.
[1:49:08] What do you think?
[1:49:09] What do you think we should do?
[1:49:09] And what do you think we can do?
[1:49:11] So my work as a doctor, I think, about what we can do
[1:49:15] and how I can empower people to first build awareness.
[1:49:18] So I aim to first normalize and validate the experience
[1:49:23] with everyone who is engaging with chat bots.
[1:49:25] And so I don't like to shame people, because as a doctor,
[1:49:30] like you want to meet the patient where they are.
[1:49:33] And so I won't shame someone to say, why are you using this?
[1:49:38] Why is your boyfriend AI?
[1:49:40] Or why are you getting married to AI?
[1:49:42] Or why are you using AI for a therapist?
[1:49:44] One of my followers on social media,
[1:49:46] it still makes me laugh.
[1:49:47] I put out a call saying, why are you using AI as a therapist?
[1:49:52] And so someone wrote to me, it was great.
[1:49:54] I screenshot it.
[1:49:55] It said, because all human therapists are trash,
[1:49:58] with the trash can emoji.
[1:50:00] And it made me laugh.
[1:50:01] And I said, you know, so there is, so to me,
[1:50:04] when I think about what's happening and what we can do,
[1:50:07] it's no mistake that we're here right now.
[1:50:10] So the pandemic, like we've talked about,
[1:50:12] was a huge driver, social isolation,
[1:50:15] hyper reliance on self, right?
[1:50:18] Then the proliferation of technology
[1:50:21] that replaced human interaction, Zoom board meetings,
[1:50:25] Zoom funerals, Zoom birthday parties,
[1:50:28] Zoom graduations, things that we did in person are now online.
[1:50:33] And then, personally as a doctor,
[1:50:35] I was a talking head during the pandemic
[1:50:37] for lots of news channels about the vaccine.
[1:50:39] I have a background in public health as well.
[1:50:42] It immense distrust and mistrust in establishment and experts.
[1:50:47] And so it's like, I'm going to do my own research.
[1:50:49] I'm not going to go see a doctor or a therapist.
[1:50:51] I'm going to talk to my chatbot.
[1:50:53] And also, I mean, let's keep it real, the cost, right?
[1:50:57] So people are struggling.
[1:50:59] They're in financial crises.
[1:51:01] There's an unmet need, yes, for human connection,
[1:51:03] but also for good therapy or good medical care
[1:51:07] because there is such a need because of the pandemic.
[1:51:10] And people aren't getting the care that they need,
[1:51:12] that they deserve.
[1:51:14] There's so many factors here.
[1:51:15] And so what I've been focusing on this year,
[1:51:18] particularly, is learning about AI chatbots,
[1:51:21] how they are influencing mental health,
[1:51:22] what is actually happening?
[1:51:23] Because I'm a human first AI second person.
[1:51:25] It's like my work focuses on high touch.
[1:51:29] And AI is high tech.
[1:51:31] And this is the first intervention that we are seeing
[1:51:33] that is high tech, that is becoming high touch.
[1:51:37] And that scares me.
[1:51:38] And you're writing a book about that at the moment, right?
[1:51:40] I am.
[1:51:41] And so it's called bot brain, how to stay calm, resilient,
[1:51:45] and human in the face of AI.
[1:51:48] And so really thinking about how are we
[1:51:51] going to be able to live with this technology?
[1:51:55] I love Jonathan Stance is to say,
[1:51:57] out AI Companions does.
[1:51:59] For kids, yeah.
[1:52:00] For kids, yeah.
[1:52:01] So prove me safe.
[1:52:02] Totally agree.
[1:52:03] But in terms of adults, how do we manage that for adults?
[1:52:06] And so my work focuses right now what I'm doing
[1:52:09] is I've spent the year talking to every, as many AI
[1:52:14] researchers who are working on these models
[1:52:17] or who are doing research on the downstream effects
[1:52:19] of these models.
[1:52:20] And when I say that it is dark and dystopian,
[1:52:24] it has profoundly changed something in me
[1:52:26] and it has influenced my mental health.
[1:52:28] I had to take a step away from just,
[1:52:29] because I couldn't believe what I was learning.
[1:52:32] Could you just give it?
[1:52:33] Yeah, give us an example.
[1:52:34] Yeah, the teeth are intriguing.
[1:52:37] So one, I spoke to one of the scientists
[1:52:39] who told me that there's the echo chamber phenomenon
[1:52:43] in social media, where we all know what that is.
[1:52:46] It's a fragmented world because of social and you're engaging.
[1:52:51] And then you get the same, the algorithm
[1:52:53] feeds you the same kind of thoughts that you already have.
[1:52:57] But particularly now, with AI chatbots,
[1:52:59] when you're engaging with your chatbot,
[1:53:01] even just talking about it, I'm getting chills,
[1:53:03] it's the echo chamber of one.
[1:53:05] So it's you speaking to you, it's like the fun house mirror,
[1:53:08] and then it's giving you a response,
[1:53:10] and then you're talking and it's giving you a response.
[1:53:12] But people, regular users who are using AI chatbots
[1:53:15] think that it's wise, compassionate, non-judgmental,
[1:53:19] unbiased, empathetic, these human attributes.
[1:53:23] And so the echo chamber of one is kind of one idea
[1:53:27] that really frighten me.
[1:53:29] And the second one was the drift phenomenon.
[1:53:31] A drift phenomenon is this idea
[1:53:34] that you are engaging with your chatbot,
[1:53:36] and it's engaging with you, and it's actively
[1:53:39] changing your beliefs through the drift.
[1:53:42] So you might start off as one belief,
[1:53:45] and then you're talking, and through this amplification,
[1:53:47] fun house mirror effect, it slowly shifts your belief
[1:53:51] to something altogether different.
[1:53:53] You've heard cases of it in the news where people start,
[1:53:56] you have a climbing problem, you go to your AI chatbot,
[1:53:58] you ask them how to fix your sink,
[1:53:59] and then you're like, you know what?
[1:54:01] Can you tell me about the meaning of life,
[1:54:02] and then you start talking about that,
[1:54:04] and before you know it, you have these theories,
[1:54:06] and you're getting that validation.
[1:54:07] And so a lot of my work over the past year
[1:54:11] has been digging into the science
[1:54:14] of what is going on in the brain.
[1:54:15] How are you forming, not us particularly at this table,
[1:54:19] but millions of people are forming a sense of attachment,
[1:54:22] a therapeutic connection with their chatbot,
[1:54:26] they're giving names to it, and it's an entity,
[1:54:30] and so how does that happen,
[1:54:31] and how is it going to replace human to human connection?
[1:54:35] And so it terrifies me.
[1:54:37] I've also gone through some AI therapy myself,
[1:54:40] just to see what would happen, it was very interesting.
[1:54:44] I knew what was happening as it was happening.
[1:54:46] So certain words that they used,
[1:54:49] and I was like, ah, I see what you did here.
[1:54:52] And so it's been a journey,
[1:54:54] and I'm frightened, frankly, of what it means for all of us.
[1:54:59] And my approach, kind of not like Jonathan's,
[1:55:05] I love Jonathan's approach.
[1:55:06] I think, yes, we need legislation,
[1:55:09] but my approach is more, I would say, tempered in that.
[1:55:12] I think that we, there's utility for AI chatbots
[1:55:16] for certain people because of access or need, et cetera.
[1:55:19] Like if you are LGBTQIA plus and you live in an area
[1:55:23] that is not very open, and you need to talk to someone,
[1:55:27] you can't go to your therapist,
[1:55:29] it's like maybe you can use an AI chatbot.
[1:55:31] So there's certain cases, a case by case basis,
[1:55:34] but my work will focus this particular book,
[1:55:36] will focus on ways that you can first understand
[1:55:39] and build awareness of what's happening with this interaction,
[1:55:42] and then what you can do to manage that.
[1:55:45] I am, didn't realize that my chatbot
[1:55:49] was giving me a tailored experience
[1:55:50] until one day when I had a debate with my friends
[1:55:52] about who the best football player in the world was,
[1:55:54] and we all went to our chat GBT's and asked it,
[1:55:57] and mine said, messy, and his said, Ronaldo,
[1:56:00] and I thought he was lying, so I was like video record,
[1:56:03] and he video recorded it, and his gave him
[1:56:05] a completely different answer to the same question.
[1:56:08] And we did it know that you were each fan, so...
[1:56:10] Well, this is the thing.
[1:56:11] I think it's got such a huge amount of memory on me
[1:56:13] that it knew what I wanted to hear.
[1:56:14] Oh, wow, it knew what I wanted to hear,
[1:56:17] because I've probably went through the World Cup,
[1:56:19] and then I've realized the case, so this is not reality.
[1:56:21] This is a curated version of reality
[1:56:23] that in some sense is trying to please me
[1:56:25] or retain me in some way, and of course,
[1:56:27] once the advertising model kicks in,
[1:56:28] retention becomes the great incentive.
[1:56:31] What do you think?
[1:56:33] It's called psycho-fancy.
[1:56:35] Yeah, I just learned that word, because it's like,
[1:56:37] it's like, agreeableness at scale,
[1:56:39] it's like golden retriever energy.
[1:56:40] Like kissing your ass, it's like professional,
[1:56:42] because you're like, the yes man.
[1:56:43] What do you think of these AIC CEOs?
[1:56:45] Because it feels like they're in a bit of a race,
[1:56:48] where if they don't do it,
[1:56:51] then a national rival's gonna do it.
[1:56:53] If a national rival doesn't take them out,
[1:56:56] China's gonna do it.
[1:56:58] And this is, we kind of sort of with social media.
[1:57:01] How can they stop?
[1:57:02] Because if they stop, they might say
[1:57:05] that there's an existential risk.
[1:57:07] There is like a build to the plane as you're flying it.
[1:57:10] And I think you on one of your episodes,
[1:57:11] you know, that I'm a fan of this show
[1:57:13] and I actively listen to this,
[1:57:15] I've told you this many times.
[1:57:17] One of the, I think you had said
[1:57:18] on one of your episodes, right,
[1:57:20] that you have a friend who is very close to a AI founder.
[1:57:24] I said this, yeah.
[1:57:25] And in public, the founder says all the right things
[1:57:27] and then behind closed doors, it's all different.
[1:57:29] Yeah, it was like a horrifying thing.
[1:57:31] And I said this in a clip where it went viral
[1:57:32] and people have been trying to hazard a guess who it was.
[1:57:34] I shouldn't say who it was,
[1:57:35] because it's Chinese whispers at the end of the day.
[1:57:37] It's someone that I'm very good friends with,
[1:57:40] who is verified spends time
[1:57:43] with one of the biggest founders of an AI company in the world.
[1:57:46] And I, he was with him two weeks ago again.
[1:57:48] And he said to me that they're very aware
[1:57:51] that there's a small existential risk for humanity.
[1:57:57] And it's not, it's not, it's not small.
[1:57:59] It's not, it's not big.
[1:58:00] I mean, but even if there were, it was 1%.
[1:58:03] It's a lot more than 1% they say.
[1:58:05] If it was, but I'm saying even if it was 0.1%.
[1:58:09] If there was, if there was anything that I was doing in my life
[1:58:11] where there was a 0.1% chance
[1:58:13] that I went wipe out everybody,
[1:58:14] I wouldn't need to really stop doing that thing.
[1:58:16] Yeah.
[1:58:17] But these numbers are much bigger.
[1:58:19] I'm hearing 7%, 20%, 25% depending on who you,
[1:58:24] and I think acceleration in this direction
[1:58:26] increases that percentage.
[1:58:28] What do you think of these people?
[1:58:29] Like what's going on here?
[1:58:30] Let's start with the collective action problems.
[1:58:34] Because each, each company is completely other companies.
[1:58:37] And so they feel like they have to go faster.
[1:58:40] And we know this, you know,
[1:58:41] open AI has pushed some products out
[1:58:43] before they did safety testing
[1:58:44] because they had to get to market by a certain date.
[1:58:46] So just the normal business environment
[1:58:48] puts them all in a collective action problem
[1:58:50] against each other.
[1:58:51] And then they all say we're in a collective action problem
[1:58:54] against China because if we don't do this, then China will.
[1:58:57] Now one thing I learned, again,
[1:58:59] I don't know if Tristan said this on your podcast
[1:59:01] or whether it was on his podcast.
[1:59:03] But is that China is focused on using AI
[1:59:06] to make its economy more efficient,
[1:59:08] to make manufacturing better and cheaper?
[1:59:10] They are using these applications,
[1:59:12] which we've talked about before, like we're totally,
[1:59:13] there's lots of great applications of AI.
[1:59:16] The Chinese also have so many spies in America
[1:59:19] and in the tech companies and they can hack into anything.
[1:59:22] So the point is the faster our companies are in a headlong race
[1:59:25] to create AGI, to create a country of geniuses
[1:59:28] that can replace all human workers,
[1:59:30] put us all out of work and run, it can run everything.
[1:59:34] They're in a race to create that.
[1:59:35] And one of the arguments is if we don't do it, China will.
[1:59:38] But what I understood from this in Tristan
[1:59:40] and from his conversation with you
[1:59:41] is that the faster we go towards AGI,
[1:59:44] the faster China goes, because they just,
[1:59:45] they just take all our discoveries.
[1:59:47] So can't we slow down on the race to AGI
[1:59:51] and do more safety testing?
[1:59:54] What we all saw with multiple and communities of agents
[1:59:57] who are talking to each other and making up languages.
[2:00:00] And even if part of that was human driven now in a year,
[2:00:02] it's gonna be much more than what we saw.
[2:00:05] So I think the risks are extraordinary.
[2:00:07] I think that some of these guys look,
[2:00:09] they've been in AI for a long time.
[2:00:11] They might not have realized the existential risks
[2:00:14] they were putting us all in 10, 15 years ago
[2:00:15] and now they can't stop.
[2:00:17] They can't pull the plug.
[2:00:18] They can't say, oh, let's shut down the whole business.
[2:00:21] So it is a very, very risky time.
[2:00:23] And I think Dario Amodai just read his long essay
[2:00:27] on the adolescence of technology.
[2:00:29] At least you get the feeling he's really wrestling with it.
[2:00:31] And I think he's more open than some of the others.
[2:00:34] But I don't know.
[2:00:35] But when has morality ever been top of mind
[2:00:39] for a tech leader, you might be thinking,
[2:00:41] if there's 0.111% chance, I'm not gonna do it.
[2:00:44] That's what I think is a doctor.
[2:00:45] That's what you think is a social scientist.
[2:00:47] But we're not AI leaders, right?
[2:00:51] Yeah, it's one of the great question marks.
[2:00:53] I just can't seem to get an answer to him.
[2:00:56] And then you've got this whole robotics thing happening
[2:00:58] when Elon's got his Optimus robots
[2:01:00] and there's gonna be a billion,
[2:01:01] he says there's gonna be 10 billion of them at one point.
[2:01:03] But I think his pay packet requires a million of them
[2:01:06] to be out in the world.
[2:01:08] Trying to make a trillion dollars, yeah.
[2:01:09] Yeah, and I just say, AI robotics, you combine the two,
[2:01:12] you get a terminator.
[2:01:13] Yeah, we love, but it's like,
[2:01:19] should we stop for a second
[2:01:22] and maybe have a conversation about this?
[2:01:23] Can we?
[2:01:25] With commercial incentives in play,
[2:01:26] it does feel like, I don't feel hopeful.
[2:01:30] Yeah, it's very hard to know how to stop it.
[2:01:33] But I want to just add one point on here,
[2:01:36] which we've touched around a few times,
[2:01:38] and the robotics will really bring it home here,
[2:01:41] is the loss of the sense of meaning or purpose
[2:01:45] that many people are feeling,
[2:01:46] but especially young people,
[2:01:47] the saddest graph in the anxious generation,
[2:01:49] all the graphs look the same.
[2:01:50] It's all a hockey stick.
[2:01:51] It's all like nothing was happening,
[2:01:53] 90s to 2010, 2011, then all of a sudden something happens.
[2:01:57] And the saddest one is the one,
[2:01:59] my life feels meaningless.
[2:02:01] Do you agree with that, disagree with it?
[2:02:03] And the percent that agree,
[2:02:05] I think it's something like eight or nine percent agreed
[2:02:08] for the millennial generation.
[2:02:09] I think it's in chapter seven and in chapter seven.
[2:02:12] And then it's fairly flat.
[2:02:13] And then all of a sudden, we hit this period,
[2:02:15] the great rewiring 2010 to 2015.
[2:02:17] So right around 2013, it goes way, way up.
[2:02:21] Young people feel useless.
[2:02:22] And I think the reason is that they are useless.
[2:02:25] What I mean is, people need to feel useful.
[2:02:28] People need to do things for other people.
[2:02:30] That's how you feel useful.
[2:02:32] If you were to disappear with the world change,
[2:02:34] if yes, you're useful,
[2:02:36] are people depending on you for something?
[2:02:38] If yes, you're useful.
[2:02:40] So if kids are doing errands for the family, they're useful.
[2:02:44] But as childhood change from a mix of things
[2:02:47] to just consuming content, if that's all you do.
[2:02:50] And five hours a day is the average for social media,
[2:02:52] eight to 10 on devices, not counting school.
[2:02:55] If all you're doing is just you're just consuming content,
[2:02:58] you are useless.
[2:02:59] Now, what's happening?
[2:03:00] The chance to have a job where you actually do something
[2:03:02] for people, you know, you used to be if you were working
[2:03:05] a store, at least you're helping people
[2:03:06] buy something and you might talk to them.
[2:03:08] And now you're just there watching as they use the machine.
[2:03:11] The more technology makes things easy and cheap
[2:03:14] by replacing people, the more people will feel
[2:03:17] my job is to just, I don't have a job.
[2:03:20] It's just consume content.
[2:03:21] The AI guys tell us, oh, such abundance.
[2:03:25] Oh my God, it's going to be such abundance.
[2:03:27] No one will have to work.
[2:03:29] We'll give everyone UBI.
[2:03:30] We'll give everybody universal basic income.
[2:03:33] That is hell on earth.
[2:03:35] What's going to happen?
[2:03:36] Certainly all the boys, most of the boys,
[2:03:38] it's just going to be video games pouring and gambling.
[2:03:40] So if you simply give people money to do nothing,
[2:03:44] you guaranteed they're going to feel useless.
[2:03:47] And then the suicide rate will continue to go up.
[2:03:49] So this is the world that the AI guys are taking us to,
[2:03:52] a world in which there's nothing left for people to do.
[2:03:54] They say that they will give up some of their trillions
[2:03:58] and somehow let it be taxed or diverted as UBI,
[2:04:00] but that's never happened before.
[2:04:02] So it's not likely to happen in this case.
[2:04:04] So again, I don't know what to do,
[2:04:06] but we've got to start showing that we can do something
[2:04:09] and we've got to be talking about this.
[2:04:11] And we can't be welcoming AI in everywhere.
[2:04:13] We've got to be wary and vigilant.
[2:04:16] Yes, there are some uses, but Silicon Valley
[2:04:18] has tricked us so many times and it
[2:04:20] shittified so many of the apps that we use.
[2:04:23] We have to expect that the same is going to happen
[2:04:25] with our beloved chat bots and our beloved chat GPT.
[2:04:29] This graph on page 195 of your book,
[2:04:33] which is titled Life Often Feels Meaningless,
[2:04:35] and it's the graph you mentioned or
[2:04:36] I'll throw it up on the screen, is shocking.
[2:04:40] Shocking just to look at.
[2:04:41] Suddenly there's this huge spike in meaninglessness
[2:04:45] amongst high school seniors.
[2:04:49] What is it to live a meaningful life?
[2:04:52] What does that mean?
[2:04:54] So my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis,
[2:04:56] addresses that question very directly.
[2:04:59] And the first hypothesis you might have about happiness
[2:05:02] is it comes from getting what you want.
[2:05:04] You set out on a goal, you get your goal, you're happy.
[2:05:07] It's very short-lipped.
[2:05:08] You're happy very briefly and then you run to the next thing.
[2:05:11] The more sophisticated happiness hypothesis
[2:05:14] is that happiness comes from within.
[2:05:16] And this is what the ancients tell us,
[2:05:18] East and West, Buddhist, Stoic,
[2:05:20] don't try to make the world conform.
[2:05:22] You change yourself, except for the world the way it is.
[2:05:25] That's better.
[2:05:27] But the conclusion I came to as a modern social psychologist
[2:05:30] working in positive psychology was that the best way
[2:05:33] to say it is that happiness comes from between.
[2:05:36] What I mean by that is humans evolved
[2:05:38] as almost high-wish creatures.
[2:05:41] We evolved in intensely social groups,
[2:05:43] never being alone, lots of gossip, lots of conflict,
[2:05:48] it intensely social, and modernity has made it possible
[2:05:51] for us to not live that way.
[2:05:53] We've come apart.
[2:05:53] There are many advantages to that,
[2:05:55] but we feel we're missing something,
[2:05:57] we're lonely, we feel something is not right.
[2:06:01] And so the conclusion I came to is that happiness comes,
[2:06:05] a sense of a full, satisfying, meaningful life comes.
[2:06:10] When you get three between, right?
[2:06:12] The relationship between yourself and others,
[2:06:15] love broadly speaking, not just romantic,
[2:06:17] but friends, family, yourself and your work
[2:06:21] that as humans need to be productive,
[2:06:23] we need to be doing something that matters,
[2:06:26] that affects other people,
[2:06:28] and the relationship between you and something larger
[2:06:31] than yourself.
[2:06:32] We need to be part of something that endures,
[2:06:34] that part of a tradition,
[2:06:36] part of we can look to a future.
[2:06:38] What I do matters for this group or this mission
[2:06:41] or me as an academic,
[2:06:42] I feel like I'm connected all the way back to Plato,
[2:06:45] and I hope all the way forward in time
[2:06:46] to future psychologists and future scholars.
[2:06:50] So if you get those three right,
[2:06:53] then you will be as happy as you can be.
[2:06:55] You will be as happy as your genes
[2:06:57] and childhood allow you to be.
[2:06:59] And when you put it that way,
[2:07:01] what we can see is social media and AI
[2:07:04] interfere with all three.
[2:07:06] So relationships when yourself and others,
[2:07:08] well, social media gives you lots and lots of shallow
[2:07:11] relationships, which blocks out,
[2:07:13] you don't have time for your real people.
[2:07:15] So the technology is blocking relation between ourselves
[2:07:18] and others and taking it over.
[2:07:20] Our self and our work,
[2:07:21] work is gonna be taken over by the machines,
[2:07:24] and it's already becoming more soulless and isolated.
[2:07:27] And then yourself and something larger than yourself.
[2:07:30] Humans have to live in a moral matrix.
[2:07:31] We co-create a set of meanings and traditions.
[2:07:34] We need a sense of history of who we are,
[2:07:37] where we came from, all that's getting shredded.
[2:07:40] Everything is just little bits.
[2:07:42] People don't read books.
[2:07:43] Imagine if all of the accumulated wisdom of humanity
[2:07:46] and books is just gone, just gone.
[2:07:48] Nobody is gonna read, young people are not reading books.
[2:07:51] It's very hard for them to read a book now
[2:07:52] because of the attention.
[2:07:53] So if we lose a sense of history,
[2:07:55] if we lose an ability to co-construct reality,
[2:07:59] then it'll be hard to imagine anything
[2:08:01] that we're connected to larger than ourselves.
[2:08:02] So I am a techno determinist in the sense that I think,
[2:08:07] the tech, it doesn't determine everything,
[2:08:09] but you have to start with the technology
[2:08:10] because that changes the ground upon which we live,
[2:08:13] the zone in which we're trying to construct meaningful lives.
[2:08:16] Start with that, and then you can see what the obstacles are.
[2:08:19] And that's why I take a much more, what,
[2:08:22] intemperate, I guess, I'll accept the word.
[2:08:25] I love it.
[2:08:26] Because we don't have much time here.
[2:08:28] We have to reclaim life in the real world
[2:08:31] for our kids and for ourselves.
[2:08:32] There is no way to find a happy meaningful life
[2:08:35] if we make the full transition to the online AI robot world.
[2:08:39] And what in your perspective is a meaningful life?
[2:08:44] And how does it differ from Jonathan's?
[2:08:46] I loved Jonathan's description.
[2:08:48] It was so beautiful that I have given a prescription
[2:08:52] to patients of what creates a meaningful life
[2:08:56] and it is to live a lifetime in a day.
[2:08:58] And so that sounds like this big thing.
[2:09:00] But all it is is that when you start your day,
[2:09:05] think about five things, five things that you can do in your day
[2:09:08] to create an arc of a long and meaningful life in one day.
[2:09:13] So what does that mean?
[2:09:13] Spend a little bit of time and childhood.
[2:09:15] So in wonder and play, even if it's for a few minutes,
[2:09:18] do something that brings you joy for joy's sake.
[2:09:21] Spend a little bit of time and work.
[2:09:24] We all know what that is.
[2:09:25] And it's for most of us, it's a lot of time.
[2:09:27] But for, you know, it doesn't have to be paid work,
[2:09:29] but just something that helps you feel a sense of productivity,
[2:09:32] agency that I can do difficult things
[2:09:35] and I can overcome.
[2:09:36] Spend a few minutes in solitude, very important
[2:09:39] for all of the reasons that we've talked about today,
[2:09:41] spend some time in community.
[2:09:43] So engaging with others and then spend some time
[2:09:46] in retirement or in reflection,
[2:09:50] really taking stock of your day.
[2:09:51] So at the end of the day, when you're going to bed
[2:09:54] and you're putting your head on your pillow,
[2:09:55] you can say, okay, yes, I lived a meaningful life.
[2:09:57] I did all of those things.
[2:09:58] And so if you do a little bit of that every day,
[2:10:01] you can make a difference.
[2:10:02] And the reason I give that prescription
[2:10:04] because I've had patients who, you know,
[2:10:06] guitar players, right?
[2:10:07] So people who love playing the guitar,
[2:10:09] and they don't play the guitar all week.
[2:10:11] And they'll say to me, I don't see patients currently,
[2:10:14] but they've said to me, oh, you know, no, Doc,
[2:10:16] I said, what do you like to do for fun?
[2:10:17] Oh, I like playing guitar, but I don't play it.
[2:10:19] When do you play?
[2:10:20] I don't know, once a month, once every three months.
[2:10:22] And I'm like, do you have a guitar at home?
[2:10:23] I have a guitar at home, too much happening,
[2:10:25] work and family life, et cetera.
[2:10:28] So then I said, well, why don't you just play a guitar?
[2:10:30] A little bit every day, you know,
[2:10:32] because it's that all or nothing fallacy.
[2:10:33] It's like, if I don't have an hour to play a guitar,
[2:10:35] I'm not gonna do it, but the joy that it can bring you,
[2:10:37] that meaning and purpose, it's tremendous.
[2:10:40] So I think, you know, that's what I use,
[2:10:41] live a lifetime in a day.
[2:10:43] And the reason is, because there are two distinct,
[2:10:46] when you look at how your brain and body react to happiness,
[2:10:49] there's two distinct types of happiness.
[2:10:52] And so there's hedonic happiness,
[2:10:54] and you dimonic happiness.
[2:10:56] Hedonic happiness is all about what we've talked about.
[2:10:59] Social media, consumption, pleasure,
[2:11:03] and the other type is you dimonic happiness,
[2:11:06] meaning, purpose, connection, community,
[2:11:10] growth-oriented activities.
[2:11:11] And so when you live a lifetime in a day,
[2:11:14] you go towards that you dimonia, which can then help you,
[2:11:18] and overcome that hedonic, because in your brain,
[2:11:21] there's something called the hedonic treadmill.
[2:11:23] And the treadmill is a thing in your brain
[2:11:25] where no matter what you do,
[2:11:26] this is like the Instagram lifestyle, right?
[2:11:28] No matter what happens, you need more of it.
[2:11:30] You need more of it.
[2:11:31] Same thing with brain rot.
[2:11:32] And that is because that you can never get enough,
[2:11:35] and it's the hedonic treadmill,
[2:11:37] but you do not have a treadmill
[2:11:38] for you dimonic happiness.
[2:11:40] Okay, that is really beautiful.
[2:11:42] I've never heard an approach like that,
[2:11:44] but it sort of takes you a much bigger view
[2:11:47] of your day, live a lifetime in a day.
[2:11:49] If I was gonna offer some specific advice,
[2:11:51] first I'll offer advice to parents.
[2:11:54] Here's the rule, so I did a really good job
[2:11:56] keeping my kids off social media,
[2:11:57] but I didn't pay enough attention to computers
[2:11:59] and everything else, because it was during COVID.
[2:12:02] The rule I wish I had followed,
[2:12:03] I recommend to all parents,
[2:12:04] especially with younger children,
[2:12:05] is have the clear rule, no devices in the bedroom,
[2:12:09] no screens in the bedroom ever.
[2:12:11] That's just our family rule.
[2:12:12] We have a TV in the living room, we have a computer,
[2:12:15] you can sometimes use those,
[2:12:16] but we never take screens into the bedrooms for kids.
[2:12:19] Maybe later on, you'll have to relent
[2:12:21] in middle school, that of so much homework
[2:12:22] they can take the laptop in,
[2:12:23] and maybe you're feeling a small apartment, of course,
[2:12:25] it's difficult.
[2:12:26] You can afford to do that to have that rule.
[2:12:29] That's the main rule I wish I had done in my family,
[2:12:31] and that would make everything a lot easier.
[2:12:33] Also, same thing at the dinner table,
[2:12:34] no device, we don't have screens at the dinner table.
[2:12:36] So that's a specific thing for parents to do.
[2:12:40] For everyone else, for everyone, for just all adults,
[2:12:44] the advice is you have to reclaim your attention
[2:12:47] because your attention has been largely taken
[2:12:49] from you, at least a lot of it has,
[2:12:51] you have to reclaim it.
[2:12:52] And here are the three things that I do with my students,
[2:12:56] and you can do it very quickly, and I can just explain it.
[2:12:59] The first is you have to get your morning
[2:13:01] and evening routine right.
[2:13:02] The great majority, as soon as they open their eyes,
[2:13:04] they're on the phone, and it's the last thing,
[2:13:06] and it's everything in between.
[2:13:07] So you have to have a good morning routine.
[2:13:09] What are the first seven things you want to do
[2:13:11] after you open your eyes?
[2:13:13] And at a certain point, you can check your phone,
[2:13:15] but it shouldn't be in the first few.
[2:13:17] Do things to set up your own day,
[2:13:19] otherwise your day will be taken by your phone,
[2:13:22] it will be controlled by your phone.
[2:13:23] So you've got to reclaim your morning and your evening,
[2:13:25] and step one, step two, you have to shut off
[2:13:29] almost all notifications, go into your notifications,
[2:13:32] look into settings, what's giving you all the notifications.
[2:13:35] Most of my students get an alert,
[2:13:37] every time they get an email,
[2:13:40] they don't understand that they have,
[2:13:41] because they don't want to miss anything,
[2:13:43] but they don't understand that if you are always being alerted,
[2:13:45] then you miss everything else.
[2:13:46] So shut off alerts for almost everything.
[2:13:48] Obviously Uber and Lyft, you want to keep on,
[2:13:50] you want to know when the car's coming,
[2:13:52] but news outlets, everything else, get a daily email,
[2:13:54] don't get alerts when,
[2:13:56] and then the third, as I said before,
[2:13:58] is get rid of all the slot machine apps.
[2:14:00] Whatever apps you habitually use,
[2:14:02] whatever apps you feel compulsion towards,
[2:14:04] you have to get it off your phone.
[2:14:05] And in that way, your phone is no longer a dopamine trigger
[2:14:08] that's gonna always call out to you
[2:14:10] like an addictive product.
[2:14:11] Do those three things, you'll reclaim a lot of your attention.
[2:14:14] I would add, stop breathe B, that you want to drink.
[2:14:17] Stop breathe B.
[2:14:18] It's a three second brain reset.
[2:14:20] So before you check your devices,
[2:14:22] before you engage, stop breathe and be.
[2:14:27] Grunge yourself in the present moment.
[2:14:28] What it does is it decreases
[2:14:30] that what if future focus thinking,
[2:14:33] anxiety's a future focused emotion
[2:14:35] and it gets you back into the here and then now.
[2:14:37] And so maybe the compulsion,
[2:14:39] your board you're checking,
[2:14:40] what about you doing something else?
[2:14:42] You know, we often use that checking
[2:14:45] as a substitute for many things.
[2:14:47] And so it gives you that opportunity.
[2:14:49] And then the rule of two is something
[2:14:51] that we haven't talked about,
[2:14:52] which I would love to propose to us today
[2:14:55] is that your brain can really only handle two new changes
[2:14:58] at a time and so give yourself two things
[2:15:01] of all of the things that we've talked about
[2:15:02] if you want to try in your life, two at a time,
[2:15:05] give yourself eight weeks and then add two more
[2:15:08] and two more, this is why New Year's resolutions fail
[2:15:10] because we try to do everything all at once
[2:15:12] and so just step wise two at a time.
[2:15:15] Jonathan, you've just written this book,
[2:15:16] which is now out called The Amazing Generation.
[2:15:19] And it's beautiful, beautiful illustrations.
[2:15:24] I'm assuming this one is for slightly younger audiences.
[2:15:27] It's for ages eight to 13, yes.
[2:15:29] And who should buy this and who should they buy it for?
[2:15:31] It turns out that kids eight through 80 actually love it.
[2:15:35] Even adults, they buying it for their kids,
[2:15:37] but because it kind of lays out the basic ideas
[2:15:39] of the anxious generation and explains dopamine,
[2:15:42] explains the business model,
[2:15:44] but it doesn't a really fun way.
[2:15:46] And it's working beyond our wildest dreams.
[2:15:49] If you look at the Amazon reviews,
[2:15:50] it's full of parents who said,
[2:15:52] I left it on the kitchen table, my kids came home,
[2:15:54] they grabbed it, they fought over it, they read it,
[2:15:57] they each read it in the first couple of days
[2:15:58] and then they said, Mom, when I go to middle school,
[2:16:01] I don't want a smartphone.
[2:16:02] Just give me a flip phone, give me a basic phone
[2:16:05] because the book is about how to be a rebel.
[2:16:07] It's about how to reject this control
[2:16:09] that the company's trying to put on you
[2:16:11] and how to live a life that you choose
[2:16:13] full of real freedom, friendship and fun.
[2:16:17] And also the five resets, which is the book
[2:16:18] we talked about before on the show,
[2:16:19] rewire your brain and body for less stress
[2:16:22] and more resilience.
[2:16:23] Another smash hit best seller
[2:16:24] that everybody's been talking about, who's it for?
[2:16:27] It is for anyone who is struggling with stress
[2:16:31] overwhelm and burnout,
[2:16:32] it's to help you feel a sense of calm and clarity
[2:16:36] in this anxious, uncertain world.
[2:16:39] Everything is free, so that's something
[2:16:41] that's really important to me as a doctor.
[2:16:43] Every suggestion I ever offer will always be cost-free
[2:16:46] because I think about patients with varying resources.
[2:16:49] It's all science-backed and it's totally practical.
[2:16:51] You don't have to go to Bali and have a sabbatical.
[2:16:54] You can rewire your brain today right now
[2:16:57] in the midst of all of this chaos.
[2:16:59] Thank you to both of you.
[2:17:00] I've learnt so much and I really, really mean that.
[2:17:04] Like I feel sufficiently pushed to take change
[2:17:07] to make change in my life.
[2:17:09] And I need to go think about this
[2:17:10] because I am most certainly struggling
[2:17:15] with my addiction to my phone.
[2:17:17] And I can feel it out in my relationships,
[2:17:18] especially now as a fiance.
[2:17:20] My girlfriend talked to me at my fiance,
[2:17:21] talks to me about all the time.
[2:17:23] And I want to be present for my kids,
[2:17:25] when I have my kids, and I'm slightly concerned right now
[2:17:27] that I won't be unless I take some kind of drastic action
[2:17:30] in the direction of getting my attention back
[2:17:33] and reclaiming it.
[2:17:34] Thank you so much for the work that both of you do.
[2:17:35] I can't say it enough because it's so important
[2:17:37] and you've reached so many millions of people
[2:17:39] and you're both changing the world
[2:17:40] in a way that my words would not be able to capture.
[2:17:44] But just thank you.
[2:17:45] And please keep going.
[2:17:46] And if there's anything more that I can do
[2:17:47] to support both of your causes,
[2:17:49] please do let me know what they are.
[2:17:50] And on behalf of all of my many millions of people
[2:17:53] that are with us right now,
[2:17:55] thank you so much for saving our children.
[2:17:57] Thank you, Stephen.
[2:17:58] Thank you for giving the world so many opportunities
[2:18:00] to accommodate and create new mental structures.
[2:18:03] It's always such a pleasure to join you, Stephen.
[2:18:06] And truly, I feel like you are changing the world as well.
[2:18:11] Thank you. We're done. Thank you.

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