How Smartphones & Social Media Impact Mental Health & the Realistic Solutions | Dr. Jonathan Haidt

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Jonathan height Dr Jonathan height is a social psychologist and professor at New York University he is also the author of several important bestselling books including the codling of the American mind and more recently the anxious generation how the Great reor IR iring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness and today we talk mainly about the anxious generation however it is not a purely pessimistic conversation indeed Dr height offers several Clear Solutions to the Mental Health crisis that now exists and that we have all created through the use of smartphones in particular in kids entering and transitioning through puberty during today's episode we discussed so-called critical or sensitive periods for Social Development for the development of an understanding about competition and violence about sex and how boys and girls are impacted differently by smartphone use and the specific solutions that do exist and that Dr height has created that can place boys and girls as well as young adults back on the trajectory of mental health so today's discussion is really one that brings together an understanding of neurobiology psychology social psychology and technology in ways that are designed to serve the most critical members of our species meaning Our Youth and for those that have already gone through youth today's discussion is also relevant to you because as many of you know and perhaps have experienced most everybody nowadays is challenged in some way by smartphones both for the utility and the ways in which they can diminish our social and family interactions academic performance and more so thanks to Dr height today's discussion really is a solution-based one and it's one that is sure to educate inform and Inspire specific positive action before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is Helix sleep Helix sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs now I've spoken many times before on this other podcast about the fact that sleep is the foundation for many mental health physical health and performance now one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure that you sleep on a mattress designed specifically for your sleep needs and that's what Helix sleep mattresses are designed to accomplish if you go to the Helix website and take a brief two-minute quiz it asks you questions such as do you sleep on your back your side or your 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you Andrew I'm a longtime listener i' I've develop many good habits because of you thank you thank you you look very healthy and um delighted to have you here I'm a longtime fan of your work I've read the cuddling of the American mind it's an incredibly important book The anxious generation incredibly important book I'll just start off with an easy question which is how are we doing as a species ah how are we doing as a species well as a species as one of my friends said you know we're going to be pretty hard to kill off we'll be like cockroaches and you know we're pretty inventive in that way uh but as a civilization I think we might well be at a point of there are Peaks and valys and there are some Cycles in history and we uh may be at one of those turning points and uh it's going to be pretty unclear what happens over the next five or 10 years um it's a very interesting time to be a social scientist I'll just leave it at that I suppose we can't point to any one factor but we wouldn't be sitting here today you wouldn't have written in the anxious generation and it wouldn't be having the incredible impact that it's having were it not for the fact that smartphones have dramatically profoundly changed the way that we interact as a species in fact a colleague of mine at Harvard Jeff lickman who's world famous for neuroplasticity said a few years back you know this is probably the first time in human history that humans have written with their thumbs implying that the brain representation of the thumbs is probably very different in all of us um than it was uh prior to that because the brain is an Adaptive map of of our experience in many ways that's a somewhat innocuous example of the changes that have occurred the use of the digits uh the thumbs uh to write but there's so much more going on now as a consequence of smartphone so if you were to say the day the date the year in which everything changed would it be the day that most everyone had and has a smartphone um somewhere around 2010 2011 2012 or did all this start prior right yeah well actually if it's okay with you I'll answer that by giving sort of the the history because the short answer would be 2010 to 2015 but it'll make more sense if I just sort of go through how we got there so changes in technology when you connect people more you get roads you get telephones these things are all great um they lead to massive gains in knowledge productivity yes sometimes they're disruptions but in the history of humanity they've been great um the internet was that when you know you and I are old enough to remember do you remember the first time you saw a web browser I do and it was like you mean I just like I type in a question and I get the answer I don't have to go to the library it was I mean it was miraculous um and and I can talk to people for free and we had that by email which was free so in general Connecting People is good and we were all very optimistic about the internet in the 1990s it was amazing and in our conversation today I want to make it very clear the internet is absolutely amazing this is not about how the internet is bad um smartphones or the iPhone you know is absolutely amazing although there are some things about it that are problematic it's really especially social media which has changed things and so um if we if we look at a kid let's take a teenager in 2010 and let's say January 2010 at that point there's no Instagram there's no front-facing camera um they all have mostly they have flip phones the iPhone came out in 2007 uh but they don't mostly have them so in 2010 most teenagers are using the flip phone as a tool to call each other call each other text each other meet up so when technology helps us achieve our goals that's good by 2015 everything's different by 2015 the great majority of Americans certainly teens have a smartphone with a front-facing camera the girls are mostly on Instagram which was the first social media platform that you had to be on a smartphone for everything else was web based um they have High-Speed Internet unlimited texting and now it's possible to spend 10 15 hours a day on your phone you nobody could do that with a flip phone so I I point to that it's that five-year period 2010 to 2015 which I've called the Great rewiring of childhood because it affects everything everything about what children and teenagers are doing I can recall in 2010 I was actually in New York City visiting friends I got my first smartphone and I recall I was up at 1:30 in the morning m scrolling on this thing and thinking this is unbelievably addicting yeah nowadays I think of it less as addicting but almost um like an an OCD of sorts and here I'm not talking about clinically diagnosed OCD but the interesting thing about OCD is that the compulsions the behaviors don't serve to reduce the obsessions rather they exacerbate them or reinforce them and in many ways I feel like smartphone use and social media use in particular is a OCD of sorts it's not just habit it's not just an addiction it's an obsessive compulsive Loop so it's already a struggle to pay attention and you know ancient Traditions have have taught techniques to improve your focus your attention we're easily distracted and um you know so I don't work on my phone very much because I I hate to type on the phone and and I'm always at a computer but even for me sitting at my computer as soon as the thinking gets hard as soon as if I'm writing if I'm doing something that requires concentration some little part of my brain says I wonder what the weather's going to be and I go check the weather or you know oh did I get any email I go check my I might check my email you know probably 40 50 times a day and I know that's terrible so the question is is it a compulsion where I feel pulled I have to check it or something bad will happen no it's more like imagine trying to do your work imagine trying to be a kid in school and you have on your desk in front of you you have your television set your record player a walkie talk to talk to your friends a guitar a painting set all array in front of you and your teacher is telling you about you know geometry what are you going to do probably one of these things and so I think the smartphone where a flip phone it's it's a tool you pull it out if you want to talk to someone then you put it away but the smartphone there's no reason to ever put it away talk to us about the scary statistics there's just no way around this yeah and we will talk about Solutions you offer some incredible Solutions in the book actually solutions that everyone listening and watching can participate in not just by restriction and we'll talk about what that means uh going forward but where are we at now and when did we start to see the trend toward diminish mental health in particular in girls yeah so feel free to hit us with the with the scary truth okay sure so let's imagine so in the US we have really good statistics based on annual or biannual surveys there's three or four big ones that allow us to see what's happened since the 70s and so what I'd like listeners to imagine is imagine a bunch of lines maybe a line for boys maybe a line a line for boys line for girls showing the percentage that suffer from anxiety depression or that have self harm those three really go together and imagine these lines they move around a little bit but they're actually pretty stable from the 1990s all the way through 2010 even 2011 there's no sign of a problem on some measures they're getting actually a little bit better because stable and low stable well low you know if it's if they're around say 12 15 % of girls qualify as having had a major depression you know that's much higher than we would like um that's a problem but it's nothing compared to what it is today so the lines are pretty flat until around 2012 and then all of a sudden the lines for girls go up like a hockey stick it's not a subtle thing it really is there's an elbow it's like somebody turned on a light switch in 2012 um now that's for the American data um internationally you see very similar things it's not necessarily 2012 in other countries but the girls graphs are very sharp the boys are also up on depression anxiety they're also way up depending on the measure it's usually everything is in the ballpark of 50 to 150% almost all the numbers are in that range um we're not talking 10 or 20% increases here for most things we're talking close to a doubling especially for the younger girls the boys curves interestingly are smoother that is the boys are more depressed and anxious it's but it's not 2012 it it actually often begins begins more like 2009 2010 and then it just keeps going up gradually so that that's a real clue um which we'll come back when we talk about the the boy story um a lot of people say oh you know it's just self-report um you know just gen Z they're really they're really um positive about mental health and they're willing to talk about it's a good thing but the fact that we see the exact same curves the very sharp uptick for girls um in Hospital admissions for self harm psychiatric emergency Department visits and we see this in the US Canada Australia New Zealand uh the UK um the Scandinavian countries so something happened across the developed World um around 2012 and I keep you know Jee twangy was the first to really raise the alarm she and I keep saying well you know we can't find another candidate nothing else fits the pattern oh and there's actually not just correlational data there's experiment experimental data too so we think you know of course look everything's complicated mental health is complicated if you want to understand why one person is depressed there are going to be many stories but if you want to understand why depression rates Rose for girls faster than boys all over the developed World unless someone can find like some hormone disrupting chemical that was suddenly sprayed over northern Europe and and the South Pacific and the US and Canada around 2012 there is no there is no alternative explanation so we break down smartphone use in these uh young girls that correlates with and maybe is causal for this diminishment in mental health there are a number of different variables right there's the time spent on the phone there's the specific content that they're viewing and that's a vast discussion that we'll get into there are the social dynamics associated with being on a phone as opposed to in-person interactions and then there's and I can't help myself myself but as a neuroscientist who trained in the biology the visual system there's the effect of looking at something at about 8 in to 12 in away from you for much of the day as opposed to navigating an environment the way that we had for hundreds of thousands of years prior so there are a lot of features within this thing that we call smartphone use right there's also the disruption in sleep yep there's additional blue light exposure there's just so much to it exactly so if we pull all that together for the time being and put it in a basket of smart phone use and maybe we'll we'll pull out each of those variables one by one as we go forward what are the numbers in 2012 in terms of how much time girls maybe you can give us an age range are spending with the smartphone was it they got the smartphone and immediately we're spending six to eight hours a day on the thing or has it been gradual so let's let's start with the time the time variable sure okay so first the way you put it is actually very helpful um what I want listeners to imagine let's say like imagine on the left side of a slide I haven't made this slide I'm formulating in my head imagine on the left side of the slide a whole bunch of harmful changes if you're getting less sleep that's bad if you're having blue light at night that's bad if you're not going out in nature that's bad if you are sedentary if you so so imagine about you know 15 different things oh if you're being contacted by strange men around the world who want to have sex with you like that's not good for 11 12 year old girls so it's all these different potential harms and then imagine all these different potential effects S one of which is depression and another is anxiety another is self harm but there's doing worse in school there's becoming more shallow there's uh conflicts with your so there's a whole bunch and then we want to look at the causal connections and what I'm trying to draw out is suppose you we suppose we could quantify the degree to which sheer time just spending five hours a day does that make you more anxious automatically well maybe a little um but that's probably not the main effect so there's a gigantic multicausal network of effects now um I have good numbers for how much the how much teenss are using these devices and these platforms today um Pew in particular did has done a great job of of tracking changes in this since the ear since the 2000s what we know today from both Pew and Gallup is that young people in America are now spending about five hours a day just on social media just social media most Instagram so it the the huge time suck is the videos so it's actually Tik Tok and YouTube are counted in this analysis they're counted as social media YouTube is marginally social media it's more of an general information Source but the point is especially the short videos the short videos are really really addictive because the time between action and reinforcement is so quick that that as you know in behaviorism like that's the key it's the quick reinforcement um so 5 hours a day uh it's a little bit more than that for girls a little less for boys just on social media 35 hours a week of strange stuff coming in from random weirdos on the internet 35 imagine letting your kid in Port 35 hours um then you add in everything else video games um everything else you do on a smartphone so now we're up to 7 to 10 hours in that range a day and this is not counting school now of course in school six hours a day for a lot of kids two or three hours of of that is screen time as well so that's why I say kids used to have a play based child Hood plays the basic thing mammals do um and since 2010 or 2012 our kids have a phone-based childhood and I don't think that is it's just incompatible with healthy human development maybe we can back up even before 2010 and talk a bit more about the play-based childhood I heard you say last night at a terrific lecture that you gave that when we don't trust our neighbors we are far less likely to let our kids out to play without observ ation or oversight um and that leads to a whole host of negative consequences so if we were to dial back to the the history clock even further and talk about let's say the 1950s 60s and 7s I was born in 75 I basically was kicked out of the house every day to go play my mom would say get out of the house I now realize she wanted space yeah but we would go down the end the street to the culdesac and we would just play and do all sorts of things DED some of were were good um and there were a lot of dynamics that got worked out in that process my sister would go hang out with the basically the older sisters of those boys that's kind of how our neighborhood happened to be arranged that was fortunate um and they would do their thing MH so 1950s and 60s what did social dynamics look like among kids yeah um so you know I think what we you need to do is tell this story of what happened as a as a a tragedy in three acts and the First Act is the loss of of community the loss of trust in each other so if we go back to the the 50s and 60s um but we can even go back my my parents grew up in New York City in the in the 30s and 40s um people spontaneously organize themselves into Villages Village Life is a is seems to be sort of the default way of living that humans have preferred for tens you know you know several thousand years um and it's where you know your neighbors the kids run around the all the adults take part in supervising all the kids uh but nobody has to helicopter because the kids are playing they're doing their thing if there's a real thread if there's a lion or Invaders then they all come running home whatever but um but kids need to be out playing with each other especially Outdoors we evolved in savanas we evolved in different parts of the world we're attracted to Nature um so that's the way it it always was now uh especially if we in the 1950s and 60s America just been through a World War and the greatest way to make people trust each other the greatest way to boost social capital is a foreign attack and of course Pearl Harbor did more for American Co coherence than anything else in history in modern history 911 did that too but only for a little while and then we we lost it um so for a a lot of reasons people trusted their neighbors kids were out playing you know my parents grew up in the depression in New York City the kids were all out playing stickball on the street or in a parking lot in the 1970s there is a real crime wave um crime goes through the roof actually and it goes through the 80s that goes all the way to the early 90s even still you were kicked out of the house to go play um even in New York City all kids went out to play that's just the way it was but we begin to lose trust in each other for a lot of reasons Robert putam wrote about this in Bowling alone the the the the loss of Social Capital many reasons for that the changing media environment air conditioning and television people are not hanging out on their porch in the summertime to get away from the Heat they Clos the door and they put on the AC and they watch TV family sizes are shrinking there not that many kids around so for a lot of reasons by the the '90s is the key decade where act two of the tragedy happens and that's the loss of the play-based childhood so in America and Britain we freaked out about child abduction and child sexual abuse um some of the scandals were real the Boy Scouts the Catholic Church there were cases where trusted organizations were covering up abuse and I recall the abduction thing the carton y thing right and there was a show I think my name is Brian you know about the kid who was abducted and then all he remembered I think it's a true story was that his name was Brian he would just remind himself every night about his real name you know I think they found him eventually in Berkeley mhm not calling out Berkeley I lived in Berkeley for a long time but um seemed to be the discovery of of Abu of abducted kid excuse me in Berkeley uh there are a few other cases there I don't know what that's about um in any of I grew up thinking that you could get kidnapped right yeah which yeah which is so it's I mean it's the most terrifying possibility for any parent um but when I was doing the research for the codling the American mind I found according to FBI statistics there's only about 100 to 150 true kidnappings a year in our whole country because if a child like who would take a child like it's a really difficult crime and you're going to you know who would steal a child from a store you know parents are afraid if your kid goes to the next D on the grocery store they going to be how are you going to take a kicking and screaming kid out of a store um it's and yet sorry to interrupt but the show America's Most Wanted I believe was hosted by a guy whose kid was abducted and eventually found dead exactly Adam that's right right so so there was this propagation of this fear like that one of the deepest fears of any parent I can to imagine is is is that that's right but the point is that these crimes are extraordinarily rare it's almost always the non-custodial parent who takes a kid it's a family member because there's a fight within the family um so we fear the wrong things we're terrified of kidnapping um but locking our kids up overprotecting them has spiked the suicide rate so much that the death toll is vastly higher from the extra suicides than it would be if we could completely wipe out kidnapping which again doesn't but you know you know the availability heuristic we say in Psychology if it's visible if it comes to mind easily then people will freak out about that and that's why people sometimes are afraid to fly in a plane they think a car is safer so so um for a lot of reasons we freak out in the 9s we stop letting our kids out we think they must always be supervised so that's act two of the tragedy and as that act is happening we're keeping our kids inside and guess what these computer things that we started getting in the 80s they're getting interesting because now we hook them up to the internet in the 80s what we can do word star and some primitive video games like but in the 90s you get the internet and now the kids especially the boys the earlier internet was much more of to Boys Boys would take computers apart they could build computers they would learn to program uh so the boys in particular they're okay with losing out on the outdoor play because the the internet is so amazing and nerdom started to become cool revenge of the nerd Steve Jobs and Steve con and I know because I grew up in pal Alto see Steve downtown he had this wasn't really like Rockstar persona but he kind of you know weeded back and forth he was he was an icon kind of like a you know counterculture guy but then he was into design and comp right but it was still really geeky M like the fonts were lame he brought beautiful fonts to it he started bringing the aesthetic forward and then of course girls and women got involved in computers more yes although that really it only really evens out once you get social media um boys are more interested in things and mechanics and and systems girls have a more evolved and and elaborate mental map of social space they're more interested in Social relationships so once you get social media that attracts the girls more and then it comes pretty even that all you know all boys and girls they're just incredibly attracted to the internet and things on the internet um but that sets us up for ACT three which is the great rewiring that's the arrival of the phone based childhood that we just talked about between 2010 and 2015 that's when everything changes as many of you know I've been taking ag1 for more than 10 years now so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast to be clear I don't take ag1 because they're a sponsor rather they are a sponsor because I take ag1 in fact I take ag1 once and often twice every single day and I've done that since starting way back in 2012 there is so much conflicting information out there nowadays about what proper nutrition is but here's what there seems to be a general consensus on whether you're an omnivore a carnivore a vegetarian or a vegan I think it's generally agreed that you should get 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ag1 is foundational nutrition designed to support all aspects of well-being related to mental health and physical health if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs with your order plus a year supply of vitamin D3 3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman Okay so we've got three acts all of which are tragedies loss of community right so community and trust is down that's right which then makes us not then act two is we take away the play-based childh because we're so afraid because we no longer trust our neighbors and then act three is as long the kids are are inside and and on on computers already oh well now just a smartphone and a tablet these are just cooler computers nothing wrong with that right and that's what we thought early on in the early 2010s we thought these things were miraculous oh you know if my kids use them maybe they'll be the next Steve Jobs maybe they'll you know they'll be really technically sophisticated we thought and it's not true and now we're in this third Act of the tragedy you touched on some of the male female differences um maybe you could uh talk about those a little bit more so you said girls tend to focus more on social dynamics boys more on systems um I've heard you say that the Boys in general Veer toward more for lack of a better way to put it more on the Spectrum type behaviors could you elaborate on that and how it impacts online um use and the particular sites that they tend to gravitate towards and then on the on the other side uh for girls yeah the the the one of the psychological traits that is the biggest differentiator between boys and girls and between men and women it's it's let me State clearly the sex differences in ability are generally pretty small small and they're few and far between sex differences in interest are all over the place and they're often very large and they're true across cultures and some are true across species um it's it's what do you enjoy and so um and here I'm drawing on the work of of Simon Baron Cohen who's the cousin of Sasha Baron Cohen um in the UK and Baron Cohen's work on autism shows that um um you know because of prenatal effects prenatal testosterone changing the body changing the brain we all start off as girls in utero after conception but then the 10th week of gestation if there's a y chromosome it triggers a little bit of uh a testosterone which then makes the testes develop and then that creates testosterone and all of this the effect on the brain appears to be a shift away a little bit away from empathizing in Baron Cohen's terms there's you can either be a high empathizer or you can be a high systemizer systemizers are people who love Subway men apps and they pick them up quickly and they like programming and they like to see how systems are related it's possible to be high on both but most people are more one way than the other so once you see that now you can understand why this amazing new internet Drew everybody but it drew the boys and the girls to different parts of it uh and so you know metaphor that i' I've started using these days uh I actually did get this from Yasha monk has a a great book called the identity trap and Yasha points out that a trap has to have bait in it that's attractive there has to be something that makes the creature want to go into the Trap and then once they get the bait there has to be something that prevents them from leaving that's what a trap is and uh in this case if you want to catch a girl don't show her like the operating system of a computer don't show her war games show her what Maria just said about Julia uh or what Julia just said about her do you want to know of course you want to know um and everybody does but girls more than boys they want to understand the social dynamics so the girls go rushing into Instagram where everyone's posting photos of themselves of other people of the party they were at the girls go rushing into well social media in general Instagram U Pinterest and um Tumblr were the three big ones the girls went into in the 20 early 2010s and then once they take the bait they can't escape because now that everyone is talking on Instagram let's say if you leave you're alone no you're not going to talk to anyone so that's how you trap girls and that's what happened to girls how do you trap boys what are the things that boys most want to do if you let them do whatever they want what are the two things that really attract them one is War and the other is sex so um if you say do you want to watch you know a movie that has violence in it or you know do you want to watch sports which is play War boys are more likely to say yes or play a first-person shooter game exactly that's right so it's so it's hunting and it's War um and if you can simulate that you know when I was a kid there was the beginning I mean I remember playing Seawolf like you shoot missile you shoot you know Torpedoes at a boat in the distance and it was very primitive technology Battleship yeah oh that's right even Battleship that's right that's right a big deal yeah that's right little plastic boats that's right yeah sinking somebody else's Battleship by by ining where the location of their ships were behind a wall it was so satisfying to sing somebody's Battleship so boys really want to play at War and I really learned this when I was 30 and my I have a group of buddies from college and we get together once a year and one year I hosted in Charlottesville and we we played paintball we went to a paintball place and there were you know about five or seven other other guys and we divided up into teams and we were divided among ourselves on the teams and it was unbelievably thrilling to work with other guys to hunt and shoot my friends and and we came out afterwards all of us and it you know it hurts when you get with the it hurts which is which is important it's actually very important because then you really take it seriously you really don't want to get shot um but it was absolutely thrilling it really felt like like there was a room in my heart um you know as a man there's a room in my heart for war that had never been opened so boys want to play at that and then the multiplayer video games the firstperson shooter games all these things let them do that the other thing of course that boys want to do is look at naked women and so you know it used to be Playboy magazine now it's super hardcore sex with anal sex and gang bangs and and uh you know choking and all sorts of things um so the boys really get that's how trap a boy show them War you know let them play war games and and give and give them sex and once they do that they can't escape so interesting we did an episode long ago on uh sexual development meaning how hormones influence brain development which I spent a little bit of time on for my masters and by the way you got the biology exactly right um and it's fascinating the way that these hormones organize the brain and some people enjoy learning that it's testost testosterone from the testes it's the Y chromosome then the testes and then testosterone that's converted to estrogen that then actually has the organizing effects of mizing the brain there all these flips in biology counterintuitive flips but I like to mention the flips because they normalize the idea that um it testosterone creates maleness and estrogen creates femaleness that's actually not true it's but you got the biology exactly right um but there I was going to add one more thing besides um War violence and sex there seems to be a um an interest by Boys in remote control things absolutely remote action at a distance action at a distance so remote control cars I never had a remote control helicopter would died to get one but remote control car that we built my my dad and I built together that was thrilling absolutely and then when we talk about girls um and and some of the the preferences for certain activities um uh maybe we we'll get into some others but yeah something about remote control um and vehicles generally that's right so there's there's an important psychological word called effectance uh made up by white in the 1950s effectance is the desire to be a cause I had this effect on the world and you know a a 9-month-old infant in the crib when he discovers if I pull this if I hit this a sound happens it's thrilling you did that and this stays with us for life you want to see that the things you do have an effect and especially boys are more in the in the physical world you know mechanical world and so shooting a gun I remember when I was a kid you know I had a BB gun that I bought at a church Bazaar I I hid it from my mother kept it in the closet but my best friend and I you know we set up cans on a row and you shoot them and boom it you know you knock it it's amazing it's thrilling um that does seem to be a sex difference now girls I think now here I'm speculating but girls seem to be more interested in having an effect in the social World um so everybody wants to have an effect but boys are more focused on mechanics girls a bit more on on relationships in the social world and I'm sure um Freud had a field day with this but um what is the apparent I don't have the numbers on this Obsession of of girls and horses and caretaking of animals and and yet there are also a lot of wonderful stories about boys taking care of dogs like I read where the red friend grows maybe 50 times and I love dogs I love taking care of raising my dog but there's there seems to be something about um The Stereotype is girls and horses that's right yeah um well the simple part is uh girls on average are a little bit more compassionate they feel the pain of creatures more boys are more into animal cruelty uh as a fun thing to do an interesting thing to do effective um so girls are are more compassionate girls tend more to want to be a veterinarian than boys do because girls love animals um my daughter was desperate for a pet and we we got her um a leopard gecko when she was about eight or nine they're really cool but she she know she was crying one day cuz she could tell it it's never going to love me you know and she desperately wanted you don't know maybe it'ss no it's a no it's a reptile no they're not they're not mammals they don't have the bond and she was desperate for a dog and she begged for years for a puppy we finally got one she she needed an animal with a she need an animal yeah that's that's well she needed a mammal she needed anamal um now the horse thing that's different I'm not going to speculate on that I have heard some speculation that it's because the the the musculature it's something about you know it it has a feeling of masculinity but I don't know that's veryan I was wondering whether or not I don't want to get I don't even got near that yeah I was wondering um whether or not it was something about the um the healthy requirement for caretaking the brushing the cleaning the the the caretaking of the animal is is pretty elaborate when it comes to a horse my first had a horse she spent more time with that horse than with me and um and the amount of care like if the horse was cing she would literally go sleep with it in the barn you know and it seemed like she um loved the amount of love that was available to give to the animal um yeah anyway I I would put that in a in a giant bucket called biophilia a term that I love from eio Wilson um just that our species you know we evolved in nature we evolved with relationships with animals um and we we cre we seek it out we can fall in love with animals we have relationships um so I think it's a healthy part of life and again it's another area where a phone-based childhood just takes you away from all of that yeah it's interesting this difference between um systems and relationships I was obsessed with Aquaria still am I love I love Aquaria I love freshwater tanks aquascaping is something I plan to get back into um at some point soon but um the most interesting part about it was which fish could go with which MH who would eat who how many plants what the density of fish needed to be in order to maintain the ecosystem as a and how to not get a system crash it wasn't so much about the relationship between the fish or or to the fish that's right so it'd be interesting to see if there's a sex difference on on aquariums whether it's more a boy thing because of the interesting complex you know systems um but you know what I what I'd really like to do with you now as long as we're talking about sort of you know these Developmental Pathways um I'm hoping that we can talk about oh oh Let's do let's stay on sexual development uh because this is something I just have a little section in the book uh in the chapter on boys I have a section where where I review the research on pornography and you know huge amounts of study of pornography over the years um uh but the hardcore pornography high resolution video um boys watching it for you know many boys well a large number of boys um um are are you know go every day to pornography sites often more than once a day um so I'd love to hear your thoughts on how that would you know how is that going to change sexual development during puberty a boy who starts at say at age 12 13 and does it for 10 years could we expect that that boy will be different with when he's 22 his dating life will be different his tell me what you you think is happening there in the brain and socially and hormonally sure absolutely and I'm not going to demonize pornography nor am I going to celebrate it all I'll say is that my understanding of the dopamine reinforcement system and I like to call it a reinforcement system as opposed to a reward system because people generally think that dopamine and dopamine hits relate to pleasure but dopamine is more of a motivator as a neurom modulator it creates a kind of an agitation State want that puts us in a state of focus and foraging to resolve some gap between how we feel and how we'd like to feel by seeking things like sex like food when we're hungry like warmth when we're cold like cool when we're too warm it's a universal currency of pursuit okay of craving and wanting as opposed to having okay dopamine does a lot more than that um and other neuromodulators are involved in wanting and craving but dopamine is Central to that so I think it's not just fair to say but it's a ground truth that whether or not it's a drug like methamphetamine cocaine crack cocaine in particular or some other drug that hits the system fast and creates a big big inflection in dopamine that the more rapid the rise in dopamine the bigger the crash in dopamine afterwards and the more miserable you feel afterwards and the more repeat of the behavior that initiated the peak will occur AKA addiction okay or at least extreme habit formation depending how one defines those when it comes to dopamine the other key thing to know is that dopamine in particular High inflections in dopamine big peaks in dopamine that occur without much effort in particular the kinds of effort that evolved to bring about the the the dopamine release such as courting dating learning your preferences learning the other person's preferences working out issues of discussion consent negotiation Etc when dopamine arrives quickly without effort such as with amphetamine crack cocain or pornography mhm the whole reinforcement Loop becomes wired to these short time scales you want something you want it now and you get it but over time you get less and less of the dopamine Peak and you get more of the dopamine trough that occurs you drop below Baseline afterwards so all of that is a bunch of neurobiological is nerd speak for absolutely the ready availability of pornography at a you know few Taps on the on the phone um no doubt triggers big dopamine the first time requires more and more investment in that behavior to get less and less of the dopamine you never get back to the initial value and you're driven further and further down the pathway of addiction and there's the loss of all the learning right that the brain and and has evolved to learn how to evoke dopamine from I don't want to say just mate Pursuit but it's courtship and eventually sex so and we know that after after ejaculation after orgasm there's a dramatic decrease in dopamine and a huge increase in prolactin what does that do prolactin and dopamine are essentially antagonistic to one another it creates states of quiessence calm it's thought to facilitate pair bonding by keeping mates near one another smelling one another sharing pheromones in fact there's something called the coolage effect we could talk about the sort of classic coolage effect there these you know effects that um have to do with the inverse relationship between dopamine and prolactin but with pornography assuming that boys are masturbating to the pornography and they are doing that to the point of ejaculation then they're getting this kind of quiessence of the system um they're feeling lethargic relaxed maybe depending on their age or their motivation they're doing it again and again but neither the dopamine nor the prolactin are being devoted to anything about courtship and pursuit nor is it in the case of prolactin related to anything Rel related to pair bonding they're just sitting there with their computer in their room and of course this occurred with pornography as you mentioned before classic pornography but when I was growing up if somebody had a penthouse or a Playboy magazine they would often stash it for whatever reason behind a business or something so no one would get caught with it and then you go there like a library it was like a thing you go and it was in places where this is getting a little weird but where people didn't use the pornography there I think they remembered it perhaps um but but they weren't spending a ton of time with it and they weren't taking in fact there was an unspoken rule you didn't take it with you and this is kind of our most kids first exposure to pornography where their dad had a Playboy magazine or something like that so I hope I I described the landscape of the biology well enough but that the short answer is absolutely creates major problems in the dopamine reinforcement system it's training the dopamine reinforcement system for fast reinforcement and diminished reinforcement over time and none of it translates to the real world yes it's not just the content so I guess what we're getting out here here is it's not just what they're seeing as so extreme and that's an issue clearly it's also that the whole process takes you know minutes yeah that's right and it can be repeated over and over depending on the refractory period of um young as opposed to real world dating and relationships which takes effort and it takes learning there's hardly any learning in the use of a drug like methamphetamine or cocaine about how your dopamine system works unconscious learning there's and there's hardly any if any learning about sex and courtship m in pornography and it's also training the dopamine system the whole motivational system around sex to be observational as opposed to participatory and I hear a lot because I'm in the Wellness Health space and I'm a man guys Reach Out by direct message Hey listen I they'll reach out that they're having real issues with erectile dysfunction with anxiety yes and these things always existed but there was a kind of a a learning a communication hopefully some you know slow your breathing down and communicate and kind of get back to a place where you're more comfortable they're not able to translate anything about their experience of sex and pleasure to the real world and as a consequence they're retreating into a world where they view if if they're heterosexual the opposite sex or if they're homosexual the same potential Partners as like these distant foreign objects that they don't understand right wow Andrew thank you that was a really powerful and clear description of what I was trying to say in the book coming just from the psycholog logical side which is um to turn from a boy into a man there's a certain amount of toughening and skill building there's skills that have to be developed and I'm so glad to use the word courtship I use that word a lot with my students I almost I hear almost nobody else using that word it's such an important word uh because we did evolve the ability to parir bond at least temporarily and we do have courtship and it has to start slowly if you jump into bed and have sex right away there's no chance of courtship it's that part is over and um so you know as you were talking I was really trying to I was thinking and I want the you know listeners to imagine imagine one 13-year-old boy um who you know really wants sex would like to have a girlfriend but he has he has a laptop he has a phone he has PornHub um he masturbates two or three times a day uh he'd still like to have a girlfriend but he's sexually satisfied because he has all this amazing pornography um and he does this every day for 10 years until he's 23 let's say and then we have another boy who you know maybe he has a Playboy magazine or maybe he has nothing maybe he just has his imagination he masturbates occasionally as boys do um but he doesn't have the hardcore porn he doesn't have the fast dopamine and then this second boy he puts more effort to actually having a girlfriend and he learns how to talk to girls and he and he he's flirting and one is interested in him um and then they have their first kiss and you know because I'm remembering back when I was you know a teenager in my 20s the most beautiful golden days I mean the most memorable days of my life it was those days when you have that first kiss and you know like oh this this is going to turn into something everything Sparkles after that everything Sparkles but the point is it's slow and it's hard work and then when you finally do have sex you know it's not like oh dopamine crash you know get out of here it's it's as you said it's like ah you know prolactin rise you know you hug you hold you hold the girl um and you know at some point you start thinking about marriage like you start think like is this the one I mean you know crazy thoughts like that you can't help but think that when you're falling in love and I at myu I teach an undergrad course and I also teach an MBA course now the NBAs are all on the dating apps they're in their late 20s they're all on the dating apps the undergrads some of them are on dating apps but they're you know they're 19 they're mostly dating and they in their circles and for the mbas I really have to work with them to see that that the dating apps are cutting off courtship in a lot of ways I mean yes you're texting but it's not the same so um so I'm so glad you explained a lot about that one is the fast it's the fast satisfaction that prevents you from learning where slow hard work towards a biological goal like sex or dating or marriage or love is what builds you up into a competent man who would want to hire or who would want to date let's put it that way who would want to date the kid who'd been masturbating three times a day to porn since he was 13 so yeah yeah yeah and and there's all sorts of things I mean my father's Argentine move moved to the states in in the late 60s and so I was raised in a fairly traditional home the from the perspective of masculine feminine roles um there were all these things around chivalry like I remember going to my first Junior High School dance my dad gave me this whole tutorial about holding the door and how what you know it's interesting that nowadays um guys are often judged in terms of their latency to respond to text messages you know um something I'm terrible at um and it's interesting that that sort of replaced chivalry like how responsive somebody is so there's a kind of a bleeding for it as long as we're we're just being very open about the past present and and perhaps future of this stuff I remember growing up and hearing stories this wasn't how my childhood went but I remember my dad telling me you know in Argentina the young boys when they would hit puberty used to be taken to prostitutes so they would learn how to have sex I that's how I mean that wasn't that long ago that wasn't my childhood and I remember thinking like what's you know is this is this what's going to happen next and but he was explaining that's kind of how it went that doesn't tend to happen anymore as I understand I haven't heard of it happening right but in terms of learning courtship learning chivalry learning um you know who pays and a lot of that's changed with the you know the changing milu of um sex and gender Dynamics but it's all iterative it's slow and iterative and everything about online use as you mentioned is it's fast you can find anything with a keyword search right no work that's right the technology makes everything easier and if we if we end up talking about AI at all which every conversation goes to at some point that's my big fear that AI is makes everything easy now that's great for us adults when we have 50 things we want to do if I can give 30 of them to AI that would be great but you know how many servants do I want my you know my son is now 17 when he was 10 11 12 how many servants would I want him to have to take care of his needs like probably zero like zero is probably the best number um but you know with with porn for the sexual drive with multiplayer video games for sports or or competition um that's right our kids are they're not they're not learn learning or developing and this is why you know I work in a business school I talk to a lot of people in in the corporate world and I always ask them how how's it going with your gen Z employees I've never heard a good word I've never heard oh they're great um it's they're often people just surprised at how they don't take initi ative if if you know if if something is broken they don't fix it they want to be told what to do they don't have the confidence they're very anxious um so you know I'm not I'm not ragging on gen Z I'm saying we blocked their development we prevented them from having a thousand 10 that millions of experiences of social interaction of challenge of failure of fear of thrill and then when they reach their early 20s and they're employed employers find there's something lacking so it sounds to me like boys on smartphones or so from this 2010 period forward um are getting this kind of hyper stereotypical male experience first person shooter games pornography girls are getting this um hyper stereotypical female experience relational highly relational but there are certain dynamics that are missing or certain components that are missing um yesterday I heard you mention something very very interesting to me which is that in both groups it seems conflict and any kind of friction is not being resolved among the participants but there's the sort of looking outward for some rule or policy law or oversight to come in and intervene um could you talk a little bit about this this relates in an interesting way to cancel culture yeah that's right um I would love to to learn more about this sure so aggression uh is a part of human nature as is cooperation and they kind they kind of have to go together you know to make it in this world you have to be able to play politics you have to have friends and allies you have to stand up for yourself um you have to push back sometimes but you have to learn to bury the hatchet and you know if you grow up with siblings you know you're fighting every day and you're cooperating every day it's and it's very important practice and if you're playing if you're playing sports outside with a bunch of kids in the neighborhood you're making the rules every day and then part of the import part of what's important when kids are playing is the infractions it's it's it's every the play stops people come together you know that was out of bounds no it wasn't you pushed me no I didn't and then every you know everybody gets practice playing judge and jury uh because everyone wants the game to go on so they're very motivated to to work it out uh you have to accept the Judgment what are you going to do storm off and go home to protest then you look like a loser and you don't get to play anymore so natural play with no adult forces the kids to learn social skills that are essential for democracy how do we make rules together just us how do we decide how we're going to govern ourselves what do we do when it looks like someone violated a rule well we're not just going to kill them we're not going to expel them we have to have a way of going on with the play so these are such crucial skills for Social Development for boys and for girls and um and kids always learn to work that out but what happens when the boys are growing up on video games there are no disputes there can't be a dispute because the game the the software basically manages everything there's no out of bounds or anything um so the play is missing a lot of the the of the key skills now um how are conflicts resolved well on social media instead of like a conflict that two girls might have had just the two of them or with like a group before which could get worked out very very quickly it's somebody posts something indirect maybe it's an indirect criticism and someone takes it in a way maybe it was intended that way maybe it wasn't but before you know it it's accelerated people are taking sides it it could blow up you don't know how big it could get it could be the whole school now gets drawn in this is terrifying so a really important idea about play is what's called low stakes mistakes so if you make a mistake while playing soccer with your friends uh no big deal like you know it's a foul redo whatever it is um but if you make a mistake on social media it could blow up to the point where you are now a laughing stock and when a kid when a especially in middle school when a kid is a laughing stock when everyone's laughing at them that is likely to trigger thoughts even of suicide shame makes us want to disappear and we're putting our kids our kids need to be immersed in small groups small groups of other kids that are stable somewhat stable over years that's the healthiest environment but instead we're mixing them in with POS potentially gigantic groups including strangers and people who are not engaging their normal empathy skills but are being performative judgmental judging in order to be liked by others so it's just an inhumane it's a it's it's an inhuman World in which to raise kids and this is part of my point about the great rewiring in 2010 American kids still had a recognizably human childhood with a lot of time together with other friends but that plunges in the 2010s to the point where now childhood is largely happening alone on a screen I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need that means the electrolyt so sodium magnesium and potassium in the correct amounts and ratios and nothing you don't which means no sugar now I and others on this podcast have talked about the critical importance of hydration for proper brain and body functioning even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance it's also important that you get adequate electrolytes the electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium are critical for the functioning of all the cells in your body especially your neurons your nerve cells drinking element dissolved in water makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes to make sure I'm getting proper amounts of 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element.com huberman to claim a free sample pack I'll never forget in middle school being at some assembly and um a kid had got down on all fours behind me and someone pushed me yeah oh yeah that game I stood up and Kevin gasman was just sitting there just cackling with his face right in front so I hit him it turns out it wasn't Kevin that did it and he hit me back and it was a disaster and I don't remember how it panned out but we ended up being friends it kind of how things got worked out well that's right conflict and cooperation you need the two together incredibly embarrassing both for getting pushed over and for hitting the wrong kid but credit for hitting somebody that's how boys work things out I'm not suggesting people do this not not suggesting violence and then both of us feeling silly and then ultimately yeah well I don't know I made it to the eth grade somehow right that's right um and the hierarchy among I mostly had male friends um but the hierarchy was something that was um very Dynamic yeah uh I have a good friend who was a he was a COO commanding officer in one of the East Coast Seal Team squadrons to one Seal Seal Team squadrons he said the reason they're so effective in those those groups is because they um Embrace Dynamic subordination where people take over as different skill sets are required and and they are relentlessly hard on each other this is something they like relentlessly hard at the level of humor but also I mean because it's so high cons high risk and high consequence they're just extremely hard on one another but it's all about this Dynamic subordination that sure they are leaders by virtue of who's appointed leader um and certain amount of authority but there's this constant Dynamic subordination and it exists in every group of males I've ever been a part of and it's wonderful and very reassuring to me because it means that you both get to potentially step up but you also get to rest when you and trust somebody else's skills I don't know how it operates with with girls I've only been um you know born with a Y chromosome this is all I know but um I imagine it exists there too in different but in different ways um so if online everything is fear-based where one is fearing a dog pile like if you say the wrong thing you're going to get dog piled you kind of wonder why anyone participates at all but it seems like people are in there are they are they in there and timid or are is boldness rewarded is it only boldness of um I guess they call you know slamming down what do they call dunking on other people I mean and here as I'm describing kids I want to acknowledge if you look on Twitter X We Now call it in the academic Tech and finance community in particular this is how the men behave this is how the women behave but it's especially apparent that the adults are kind of acting like kids and the kids are kind of acting like adults so what's going on are We Are we drawn into this as well as adults and are we modeling this or is this just um social media pulling on these strings of of you know deep evolutionarily conserved wiring yeah well so first um you know let's let's let's not be too sort of monochromatic about social media there is a lot of humor there's a lot of jokes there are a lot of funny cartoons videos and learning so there is there is good stuff mixed in and even the bad stuff is entertaining in the way that looking at a car crash or a dead body is entertaining people it draws the eye um so so young people are very interested and us adults too are very interested um it it it you know it draws Us in um but then yes it certainly changes our Behavior now actually um there's some research on on trolls uh is it is it that whenever you go on Twitter you become a jerk and um um uh and actually um no it seems more that what happens is there's a small number of men always men um who have a personality disorder um they um they like to be jerks they like to get a reaction from people they get blocked a lot they get kicked off platforms and this small number you know in a real Community probably when you were growing up there were one or two kids who were like this and they got in trouble a lot and they probably ended up dead or in jail um but online this you know suppose it's 1% of 1% of men are psychopaths so suppose it's this 2% of men let's say who are jerks like this um well online that's who we all see so so um uh so in part it's that the online World Super empowers extremists and jerks it's also that in the online World everyone is feeling performative everyone is you know you might even even if you're making a joke you have to think three steps ahead how will it be misinterpreted so a metaphor that I have in my head whenever I'm online is it's really just like being on thin ice like you can have fun on thin ice it's not all bad but you're kind of always aware that you're in danger whereas when you're hanging out with your buddies you know your good friends there's you feel totally safe and if you accidentally insult one of them you know it's like oh you know sorry you know yep you're right I'm sorry um and as followership increases the ice gets thinner yeah that's right that's right the right the higher they go the harder they fall and then a lot of people want to see want to see your fall um just want to make one point you that was interesting concept that what something in sub subordination Dynamic sub Dynamic subordination kind of like a flock of birds but is how it was described to me but you know I always thought in in the you know tier one uh Special Operations community that you know people would spend more years there Advance further and further and that's true too but but this idea that it's just understood that the hierarchy evolves in real time and the and the more um people Embrace that the better performing the group is as a pack yeah now the word hierarchy certainly takes on a bad name especially like in our academic circles hierarchy you know is bad and power is bad bad and then subordination all these things are bad power you know inequality but I think part of what's going on there so you know I teach in a business school and there's a huge amount of writing on leadership and and I haven't read much of it but um but a key idea that I that I got I'm trying to remember the author um is that the the key puzzle is not why people want to be leaders it's why do they want to be followers we really need to study followership and so people are willing to follow because part of our amazing human ability is to work together groups to overcome obstacles we don't have sharp teeth we're not very well we're fast in long distance but not in Sprints um but we're able to work together um and when we Face a common threat we very willingly seed leadership to a leader but we have to trust him and if the leader shows that he's a narcissist that he's putting himself first that he's benefiting at our expense we don't we don't trust him so what you need to do and I think this is more clear males are more hierarchical this is true in chimpanzees as well males are they take to hierarchy more readily um males benefit from having practice I don't think of it as dominance and submission I think what you said is actually more more effective it's like they need practice like being the leader of this project and then being a follower because you grant like yeah you lead us on this you take the lead on this and then something else will reverse and if you have a young man who has a lot of that experience that's going to be a young man that you will want to employ when he's in his mid-20s whereas one who never had that it's just going to be much more difficult to work with in a in a in a business setting yeah the groups of boys I grew up with and men that I've worked with and been friends with it's always been understood like this guy's really terrific for finding stuff and this guy's great with vehicles and this guy's great with gorals and this guy's that people have different skill sets and and that the group together can really mesh um but there isn't an attempt to be something that you're not and you quickly find out who you are by who you're not and you find your unique skill set yeah and um and you you know uh you evolve in that way by not trying to be everything to everybody whereas I noticed with my sister and her groups of friends it's changed over time of course but that there tended to be one girl that was really dominant in the play session like the whole time the bossy one right you know um and even though some stories you know kids books with that that mainly feature boys have that um I don't recall that being such a big part of my reading experience or childhood experience like in the Encyclopedia Brown books like there was like the mean kid and the like but people would slot in where they were most Adept so it sort of like natural tendencies to excel were complimentary and I don't know what it is for girls but online it seems um all of that's erased um so you've got these social dynamics that are very um heightened being played out on social media with with girls but boys and men are on there as well and most of what's on social media is social it's relational so are boys and men being drawn more toward those sorts of interactions and how well are they navigating those interactions is it common for boys to make big mistakes online and um and then be shunned as a consequence or is this more common in um females yeah that that's a good question um life online is performative for girls a much bigger element of the performance is perfectionism about the image so girls spend a lot more time choosing a photograph editing a photograph making sure everything's perfect whereas guys you know like I literally don't notice if my socks don't match my wife has to tell me your socks don't match um you know guys just don't notice those things as much so you're a professor after all yeah AB mind Professor suppose yeah but my point is that is that life online it does affect all kids so fear of missing out is something that affects everybody you know Snapchat you see all your friends over there and you didn't even know that there was something going on so you know boys and again boys and girls they'll have similar insecurities it's more a question of degree so the the the perfectionism the the playing out the social dynamics to three steps like girls are playing three-dimensional chess about social relationships well but why did he say that if he also wanted this when she he knows that she knows that you know and guys's like what what do you I don't even know what you're saying they're barely playing checkers that's right that's right and again it's that it's that um uh you know it's that the early the organizing effects of prenatal hormones this is not culturally taught this is what kids enjoy doing based on I believe and Simon Baron Cohen I believe believes um is the organizing pren the prenatal organizing effects of hormones on the on the developing brain but on YouTube where it's my understanding primarily male yes there's a lot of clapback type comments um I know this because I have a YouTube channel um and in the old days it seems it wasn't that long ago when Rogan was had full length episodes on YouTube then he didn't now he does again the the jokes the comment section on YouTube were like their own show it was outrageous it was so good and um some of that's coming back now that was it men showing off their cleverness right I mean like for instance you might be familiar with jao willink the right you know this s if you had to draw an Navy se you draw Joo kind of looks like modern General uh General p modern day General Patton right and there's this whole category of jokes based on Joo who I think actually has risen to prominence in the online culture because he's sort of like the football coach that most young males never had he's the guy that's going to tell you what to do when to do it and do it even though you don't want to and just do it and he and you trust him he's a very trustworthy guy as it were and he's a warrior and he has all the credentials Etc but there's this whole category of jokes like um you know when joaco was born um the doctor looked at his mother and said it's a man you know or or when jao left for college he looked at his father and said you're the man of the house now you know jokes like that you know there are tons and tons of these right so there's this whole so that's very YouTube male type humor it's it's one hit it's done it gets a ton of likes and it propagates yeah none of this two or three chess moves down the down the road um so it's very clapback sometimes in or in that case building up Joo who doesn't need any more building up but people do it anyway so things of that sort so interested in the in these um in the Nuance here because um you're telling me that girls are killing themselves more they're depressed their increase in suicide is larger boys have a much higher suicide rate so boy many more boys die from suicide more violent means that's that that's one of the major reasons and that's especially true in America where we have so many guns boys tend to use a gun or a tall building or a bridge whereas girls tend to use pills or cutting their wrists and they and the great majority of girl suicide attempts don't lead to death yeah so are most of the issues with girls and online use social media it's sort of um uh it's despair it's at home anxious sad about self self- critiquing this kind of thing I mean you're telling me there's a a huge and I believe you that there's a tremendous increase I mean he said hockey stick like function um when we're looking at essentially capturing the tip of the pyramid in terms of like extreme social interaction so take let me I'm not being very very clear here we have these neural circuits that evolved for social interactions that are more heightened in girls they're getting much more of it faster yeah and the consequences are no less and probably even more severe than they used to be but it's still shunning shaming um self attack and and anxiety depression Etc in boys the neural circuits that we're talking about are are related to sex and violence those evolved over hundreds of thousands not millions of years and those are heightened so we're s capturing the the extremes of these neural circuit functions I'm looking at this through the lens of a neurobiologist is great and this is where it seems we're running into trouble because the the iceberg below all of that the portion of the iceberg below those those peaks of behavior and interactions like none of that's happening there isn't the um it's all happening faster it's more potent and the consequences are are more severe that's right that's right I think there's a good analogy here to junk food where I've heard junk food or the H you know a cheeseburger described as a super stimulus um and you know ice cream is a super duper stimulus you know it's got fat it's got sugar right and a and a cheeseburger with a milkshake and the milkshake has candy in it yeah ice cream and then you get a toy and they're playing music I mean that's a dopamine bath that's right so if we think about if we think about about life in the presence of junk food if you raise your kids with junk food you're going to have all kinds of you know metabolic problems developmental problems obesity all sort of diabetes all sorts of terrible things um now if you have a normal development and then as an adult you you indulge in more junk food you know it's you know it's probably it's not good for you but it's very different than being raised on it the the developing brain the developing body are much more sensitive and so the way you just put it before it's like the it's like these evolved motives you super satisfy them with the these overwhelming quick easy hits um it may not be so bad for an adult we can choose to have you know we can choose to uh you know pay for sex we can choose to uh you know eat it you know eat a cheeseburger and a and a milkshake um but it's very important for kids we have to see the genes don't have that much information in them but they start the brain developing and then the brain has to sort of find its way the neurons have to find their way Guided by local signals how to develop and then the child has to kind of find its way through its culture getting a sense of how do I behave here and and who am I and how do I relate to people and it's all a very delicate process that has to be drawn out over many many years we we everything about us develops slowly especially compared to other animals and if you intervene in the developmental process and say Hey kid you want the Endo without the journey here you go take it you're cutting off development and that's I think what life that's what the phone based childhood is doing well here's my concern um um there is a reality to these things we call critical or sensitive periods yes let's talk about that um critical periods implies that it's open and shut and they're actually sensitive periods for language learning for brain plasticity and the the general Contour of this is passive experience up until about age 25 dramatically shapes the maps in the brain that we have of social relationships of the visual world the auditory world I mean there's just so much data to support this in animals and humans then after about age 25 you can pry openen the underlying neurobiological mechanisms for neuroplasticity and you can rewire your brain but it takes a hell of a lot of effort Andor pharmacology to assist which is part of what the excitement about some of the Psychedelic therapies are about because um and I'm not suggesting people just run out and take psychedelics but but they can foster change they can foster change and they're either neuromodulators or they stimulate the massive release of neuromodulators like dopamine serotonin mostly serotonin and dopamine when we talk about psilocybin and MDMA LSD Etc but that plasticity needs to be directed so just taking the drug doesn't do it on its own okay so leaving that aside uh what do we know for sure we know that as the brain progresses from age three four five six seven there are Milestones that have to be met and in general if a kid makes it to high school age or college age regardless of whether or not they go to to hopefully they do and graduate high school or college there's a set of Milestones that they have to reach the circuits are going to develop one way or another the question is what are the what are the thresholds under which dopamine is released well you I would argue and I'll go on record saying that if a kid watches a lot of intense High potency violent porn and that becomes his dopamine stimulus well then other stuff probably won't do it for him whereas if there's a variety of experience or more let's just say subtle dare I even say healthier right um stimula then the system is the dopamine system around cording and sex is more varied it's it's more of a at least more of a buffet and hopefully a healthier Buffet right um again no judgment here of different proclivities but here we're talking about the wiring of neural circuit same thing with food if one grows up on highly processed very very tasty food for a while fruits and vegetables in their pure form Meat and Fish in their plain form are boring it does not evoke the same reinforcing property and earlier I I I forgot to to mention why I prefer the word reinforcing as opposed to reward because reward evokes this idea of the thing being the reward but the reinforcement is reinforcement is a verb and so as a verb it it brings the mind to the fact that these circuits are are like they're churning in the background there it's not just about getting the thing it's the um it's the underlying bi biology that that gets you there and so I think that where I'm very concerned is that we've now got what millions and millions of kids boys and girls whose neural circuits were wired up wrong and now there needs to be it seems a very active process in unwiring that or at least shifting those neural circuits towards something that's more adaptive yeah so before before we talk about what to do if you're older because I have the the great Good Fortune to be sitting here with you right now I'd like to ask you um to help me expand what I say in the book so you you gave a description of of critical periods where there's a hard beginning and end and of sensitive periods are periods in which it's just a lot easier to learn something and if you don't learn so for example phology is one of the clearest cases you accent you know if you you know when a family moves to America from somewhere else if you've got two kids in the family one of my advisers at at Penn in grad school um Henry GL had a very very heavy German accent and his younger brother two years younger had no ACC whatsoever because Henry was 14 and his brother was 12 when they came to America from fleeing Nazi Germany um and so there's a sensitive period that kind of closes at puberty for language so I talk about that in the book and then I talk about more speculative sensitive period um that I've read about you know a few people think this exists and and I I cite a Japanese study um of of Japanese businessmen who moved to California in the 70s as Japanese business were thriving and they looked at when did the when did the kids come to feel American and the answer was if they came and left before age n nothing they went back to Japan they were totally Japanese if they came uh when the kid was 15 nothing the kid was already Japanese but wasn't going to ever feel American if they came and spent a few years between about 9 and 15 then they go back to Japan now especially if the kid's now 15 or 16 the kid now feels American and has trouble fitting back in puberty well that's right there's a period it's it's early puberty it's you know like just before puberty to sort of Midway through PU Liberty seems to be a sensitive period for culture learning and for identity your very deep sense of who you are and how you relate to people so this is speculative but it does seem to fit a lot of interesting data and and the reason why I I focus on this in the book I decided like late in the process uh you know I knew I had to talk about puberty I was going to have like a section on I was my God this is so important I need a whole chapter on puberty and I talk about initiation rights all over the world adults think kids don't just turn into men and women they need help they need to be given the special knowledge for boys there's usually orals more so than for girls um and so I think what's going on is we do have this sensitive period for cultureal learning how do you learn to become a person in your culture and you know I was I was in the Boy Scouts and boy scouts was created around World War I as like paramilitary training like learn Virtues Of You know self-denial and oh you know Brave clean loyal trustworthy rever iot the order all messed up but it was a set of Virtues um so would you agree or what would you say about sensitive periods for this really high level stuff we're not talking Vision or phology which are fairly low-level cognitive things we're talking like your sense of who you are what would you think about a sensitive period for that oh first of all puberty is just fascinating and underd discussed in my opinion as a critical developmental milestone it's also the the fastest rate of Aging that we ever undergo aging meaning in our you know in terms of change of the brain in terms of um rate of uh I mean there are some theories that that the that the rate of puberty and the timing of onset of puberty actually might predict something about longevity oh which way early puberty is B early puberty might be bad but I want to be very careful and saying that some people including myself have a very protracted puberty so I hit puberty around 14 but I didn't get facial hair until I was out of college wow so some people develop the so-called secondary sexual characteristics slowly but I always had this voice since was a little kid so 5 years old they call me froggy now that's me um and everyone goes through these things differently um but puberty is the most profound brain change that one can undergo tell me more about it because I just keep saying like well it starts in the back of the brain and then is but be be specific what is happening to the brain during puberty that would be relevant here to a sensitive period okay so this goes back to the biology that you accurately described earlier which is that while we're in utero if there's a y chromosome then a bunch of genes are made like mulian an inhibiting hormone the malarian ducts become inhibited um the testes grow then testosterone is secreted and testosterone and some of its derivatives like dihydro testosterone organize the brain quote unquote male this is dangerous language nowadays but it's less dangerous now than it was two years ago okay well we're not talking about gender we're talking about biological sex here and we're not talking about the verb sex we were talking about that earlier we're talking about biological sex so what I'm describing here is is not uh disputed the so there these organizing effects of hormones early on and then there're the activating effects of hormones that happen during puberty so then puberty hits the test starts secreting testosterone um if they fat stores on the body they secrete estrogen again testosterone and estrogen working in parallel and in males a number of different brain areas in particular the hypothalamus but also the forebrain and Associated areas undergo massive plasticity in growth relating the with the for brain the frontal lobe right the frontal lobe oh so one of the most profound changes in puberty that happens especially in males but also in females is that well we can describe the the major function of the prefrontal cortex this neural real estate right behind the the forra has many different subdomains involved in things but one of its main functions this was beautifully described by the the guy who's now the head uh neurosurgeon at neurolink Matt McDougall is to say sh to the impulse driving actions of the hypothalamus in particular hypothalamus houses neurons for temperature regulation sexual drive hunger aggression I mean so much so that you can go in and stimulate certain neurons and the ventromedial hypothalamus with an electrode and you would go into a rage wow stimulate neurons also within the ventromedial hypothalamus just nearby and uh you'd want to go spend some time with your wife alone let's just put it that way I mean a remarkable specificity of the neuronal outputs to behavioral change and state change so all of that gets set up essentially during puberty because the neurons of the hypothalamus are responsive to these hormones that are coming from the gonads and in females it's yes mainly secretion of estrogen but also testosterone okay so the brain is changing in dramatic ways not the least of which is the forbrain is learning how to suppress impulse okay and some of that gets feedback from behaviors from parenting how topress learning how to supress from social reward or punishment if it doesn't get daily practice in suppressing if you're able to give into all your urges cuz like I'm finding like when I sit at my computer my Rule now I have to say to myself out loud finish what you start finish what you start no don't go check until you've done you only have two more pages to read read those two pages but I I can't do it right well this is the gradual creep of sort of a we don't want to make it clinical but an adult like ADHD like symptoms that we all are suffering from right there's just it's just we're at a buffet right and delicious that's a good example so um that's one of the main things this uh forbrain to hypothalamic wiring the other is and is this not trivial and you mentioned in the context of language learning and Dr Eddie changen who's a neurosurgeon uh actually chair of neuros surgery at UCSF knows a lot about this and critical periods is that their hormone effects on say like thickening of the vocal cords which is why on average boys have um deeper voices than girls and so forth after puberty and there's a lot of feedback from those signals in terms of the social world because now a young boy whose voice deepens who's also acquiring more knowledge is talking to other people about that knowledge and he's being treated differently and there's feedback in terms of his self-concept and that's where it gets kind of high level abstract in girls there's feedback of sometimes it's bodily changes positive or negative feedback from peers other girls Andor boys but also knowledge she's out there talking about well you know like she's brilliant in math or you know brilliant in literature and getting the feedback and then self- knowledge starts to accumulate and the the location of identity in the brain is unclear it's probably distributed Network it's probably an emergent property of a lot of different things so we can't really point to one area but it's learning impulse control reinforcement contingencies on what time scale can I get what I want to meet certain drives and to what extent should I suppress those drives and you know traditionally it was I think through religion and parenting and um social cues that you will learn well if I want something is it okay to do it that there are consequences to eating more or less consequences to be okay so it's super complex but but that all happens sometimes in a summer this is what's so amazing to about puberty to me you know or the acquisition of facial hair in in a boy you know suddenly he's looked at differently people will start projecting all sorts of Futures on him you know um but we do this I notice I'm not a child psychologist obviously but as soon as my niece started drawing she's going to be an artist as soon as a boy starts building or a girl starts you know gets a math problem right is going to be a a mathematician I mean we project all this stuff and and there's no question that that feeds back on identity but in terms of online use I can't even imagine how much of this is diminished by only showing a specific part of ourselves and I can't even imagine how much of it is exacerbated in terms of what we are rewarded for during puberty so here's what we know in both animals and humans which is that neuroplasticity while it responds to punishment is exquisitely sensitive become sort of a runaway train for more plasticity under conditions of dopamine reinforcement and reward so you can imagine that the girl using the filter the Instagram filter for who gets rewarded for looking a certain way maybe excessively thin or something or what leads to excessively thin um there's no question that rewards Drive neuroplasticity faster than punishment make sure I understand this you're saying suppose a girl gets uh a girl gets onto Instagram and she's now consuming stuff about being thin and for some reason she finds this rewarding are you saying that the the the quick dopamine circuits or she posts something and she gets likes for it are you saying that that actually will extend neuroplasticity the fact that she's getting more dopamine s rapid dopamine that will make her more neuroplastic and her brain will change more yes it will it will accelerate learning for the whatever contingency led to that whatever led to that so we know this in animals and humans even though they're exquisitly sensitive plasticity is exquisitely sensitive to punishment you know it only takes one shock learning in one corner of a cage or getting sick at one particular restaurant that you don't want to go back again but when it comes to social dynamics we know that reward leads to almost what I would call runaway plasticity in the circuits that generated the behaviors that led to that particular reward I mean it's um and there are a number of experiments that that explain this the work of Mike merenik at UCSF who largely worked on adult plasticity but showed that when you when you activate dopamine release in the brain fortunately both during development but also in adulthood you essentially create a window of super plasticity okay that's dopamine reward that neuromodulator is a window for super plasticity and evolutionarily it makes sense like oh my goodness there's there's abundance here of something oh time to learn something new that's right we've we've overemphasized the extent to which plasticity is driven by punishment but the the neuromodulators that allow for plasticity in particular in puberty and as adults are largely dopamine dependent and acetylcholine dependent um the acetylcholine generally increases Focus um broadly speaking I mean does a bunch of other things controls muscular contraction Etc but so what we're basically saying here is that if a kid gets a strongly reinforcing experience I I'd be willing to bet both arms that the neural circuits that help generate whatever behaviors led to that experience are going to be strengthened in one trial to the extent that it will be very easy to generate those those behaviors again okay so this okay thank you this is exactly what I wanted to know to to deepen my the theorizing that I do in the book um so now this is actually the perfect time for us to switch over to the four recommendation the four main recommendations because they build exactly on what you just said they help me explain why this is so important so um so you know I think one one reason why the book seems to be doing very well and people seem to like and pass it on is that it's not just Doom and Gloom it's not just oh we've messed up our kids oh these terrible devices um rather it's about a vision of childhood which is actually beautiful it's the one that that most of us older people had it's with play outdoors and all um and and so the um my analysis in the book is that the reason why I got this far is because it's a set of collective action traps everyone every 10-year-old needs a smartphone now because every other 10-year-old has one and you don't want to make your kid be alone so the four recommendations I have are four ways of breaking out on the Trap but the first two are really about delaying and getting past this period of plasticity and you really help me see why it's so urgent to delay until late puberty at least so here are the four Norms that I think can break us out of this trap Norm number one uh no smartphone before high school you can give your kid a flip phone flip the Millennials had flip phones they came out fine no access or no smartphone of their own your own you can't have your own and that would even go for an iPad if you give your kid an iPad and say here Billy this is your iPad you can keep it in your room and use it any you know anywhere in the house and you can take it outside even although maybe no W Wi-Fi whatever the point is um the internet is an amazing thing and you know you can have a computer in your living room or kitchen when you have young kids and they can do things on the computer but you do not want to give your child the entire internet in his or her pocket and you do not want the entire world to be able to reach your child whenever they want to so it's just insane that we're giving children even before puberty a smartphone let them have a flip phone or a simple phone watch something like that that's rule number one rule number two is the most relevant for what we're just talking about and that is no social media until 16 there is I believe no way to make social media safe for children that is if they're going to be entering a domain in which Prestige is gained by having posts that get the most likes and followers you're making them be brand managers you're making them be performative this is not playful they're going to be exposed to horrible horrible things I now ask young people is there something that you saw when you were young that you really regret seeing and a lot of them have an answer uh my 21-year-old Dorman just told me about the gauntlet uh running the gauntlet it's a series of 20 videos it's a challenge can you watch these 20 videos which end with you know a Mexican drug gang dismembering a person who's alive things like that like yes I'm tough enough I can do that really at what age should you do you want your kids watching people being dismembered 10 11 is that and those images are forever for that's right that's right I didn't even watch the video I you know what I'm sorry I said that I we provide a link no I'll say that you know trauma is defined as a adverse event that forever changes the way the brain responds in ways that make people less effective in life so don't do it to yourself like I wouldn't watch the Dalmer movie everyone was talking about the Dalmer movie all I had to see was 10 seconds of the trailer to know I'll pay money not to see that not because I couldn't through it I'm sure I could force myself to but I don't want that in my neural real estate right it's just they're for right for obvious reasons so so let's go back to what you said about neuroplasticity so because if if it's true that puberty is a sensitive period for many higher level uh uh aspects of our Humanity such as identity relationship skills all that stuff then you should be extra careful when your kids are 9 to 15 years old you should be extra careful about what's going into their eyes and ears and instead that's when we give up all control you know when our kids are little they pay attention to us we read to them we have a lot of control about what our kids consume when they're toddlers And when they're very young but as they reach middle school and high school they're moving away they're seeking out other stuff and that's exactly what we say here here's your own device you want to go down a rabbit hole of eating disorder stuff you want to go down a rabbit hole of of you know of you know Tourette Syndrome um you're going to copy people who have these symptoms so the last thing we should be doing is exposing our children in this sensitive period to socializing information from random weirdos on the internet who were selected by an algorithm for the extremity of their behavior and the degree to which that extremity earned them likes which makes them extra prestigious um so yeah I laws that raise the age to 16 or 18 I think that's what we need um this is just not appropriate for minors even if there's some good stuff on it I think it's vastly outweighed by the bad so that's and that's the second Norm no smart no social media till 16 uh the third Norm is phone free schools and again you know if we expect kids to learn and learning is brain change if you're learning something you're developing a skill something about your brain has changed uh how about instead of learning math or reading or litter or anything else how about if you just do more phone stuff you just spend more time in school on Tik Tok there was just an article in the Washington in the Wall Street Journal about a teacher who fought against the phones and finally gave up and quit and one of the students in his classes quoted um that she used to she'd come into class and she would just go on Tik Tok and that's what she would do all class long is just watch Tik Tok in her desk um you know and like no you should be learning not doing more Tik Tok in school so it's just insane that we let kids take the greatest distraction devices ever invented into the classroom with them I would argue that they are learning but what they're learning are these rapidly reinforced dopamine Loops that lead to diminished amounts of dopamine not just in short periods of time but very quickly and that inhibit other forms of learning yeah that's right and the ability to pay attention right to to a teacher which is not as stimulating as what you're seeing on Tik Tok there's tons of learning it's but it's learning of all the wrong things that's right that's right so that's the third Norm is uh no uh is phonefree schools you have to lock up the phone in the morning either a lock in a phone lock or Yonder pouch um if the policy is you keep in your pocket that's not a policy that's just a recipe for constant conflict with the kids because they can't help it they have to text if anyone's texting they have to be texting and the fourth Norm is the hardest the fourth Norm is uh far more Independence free playay and responsibility in the real world because what we need to do is not just roll back the phone based childhood and make them just sit and do nothing we have to do is restore a really fun adventurous childhood like you know what you were saying you know you go out on your bicycle you're hanging out with your friends friends sometimes something happens and boy you have memories I mean exciting things happen scary things happen you have memories and you know I worry about like what you know what boys today you know I have a group of Buddy my group of friends that I you know we we still talk about things that happened you know things that amazing things that happened when we were in college or after college and I wonder what boys young boys today are going to say you know you remember fortnite game 27363 where you were trapped in that Elevator Shaft and I had to shoot you out no I don't remember that one you know like uh the the virtual Adventures are just not going to cut it our kids need Adventure they need Independence and Adventure uh where they work out the conflicts themselves so if we do those four things I think we can restore childhood in the real world no smartphone before high school no social media till 16 phone- free schools more Independence free play and responsibility in the real world those four things and these are things that we can all do if we work together if we do them at the same time if you're the only family that's keeping your kid off a Smartphone till high school and off of social media till 16 you're imposing a cost on your child and she may be lonely and she'll say Mom I'm left out now she might still thank you as we saw last night some one of the women said her daughter thanked her for keeping her off but at the time it was painful for her and so my hope is by spreading these Norms no parent will ever be in that position again where their kid is the only one in the class who doesn't have a smartphone at age 10 to have this fantastic list I say fantastic because it Jes with all of the neurobiology that I'm aware of and because it offers solutions that it's really based on knowing what's happened and is happening with with smartphone use there are a bunch of don'ts but then there's some dos which I you know I'm not again I'm not a um an expert in behavioral change but I spent a fair amount of my time talking to people about what they can do for their health and well-being and not just the don'ts um and I I think it's important as I understand to have replacement behaviors and also I think people of all ages want want to do something that feels good the first time and every time and that's good for them and then you create that reinforcement Loop in a different direction um you're offering all of that in the book and here and it's fabulous what I wonder about and um would love to help in any way that I can uh with is you know if you recall years ago there there was this understanding about the first six years of life being critical it was the first six years and so parents kind of overstepped it a bit and were playing their kids Mozart all the time and things like that waste of time but what was interesting is that they were thinking about critical periods in brain plasticity and so as a neurobiologist who say brain development I I was delighted um it seems to me that if there was an understanding that the biology and psychology and sociology points to the fact that there is a critical period maybe not even a sensitive period but a critical period in which excessive smartphone use of a particular type is actually leading to more suicides depression anxiety and less learning and um adaptive behavior in life it seems to me that it should be a almost like a law it should be implemented at the level certainly at the national level what what sorts of barriers do you think exist to that um you know obviously I'm enthusiastic in joining your effort and and um I know many people listening will be as well to try and Implement these four things but what do you think it would really take to get people to take their children's brains and lives seriously because children can't be left to their own self-care to that degree it's just unfair right I mean it's like telling a kid in a candy shop like Hey listen you know figure it out you know there's nutritious food down the stre like it's unfair right it's like a puppy trying to trying to do the you know Westminster Championship it's like it's not going to happen um you know but this is serious stuff I mean we're talking about the future not just of the United States but of the entire species so um what about laws what about legislature how does that work I don't know anything about that sure well first so you know let's let's note you know I could be wrong about this um it might be that the phones aren't doing this now I think the evidence is pretty good that it is but let's suppose there's a 70% chance that I'm right let's Suppose there was only a 30% chance I was right the the consequences are so severe we should be taking action now what action to take I was over in the UK for the book about three weeks ago and in the UK you know and the rest of Europe the first thought of everyone is Ban it ban it ban it government law ban and there are times when we need that you know cigarette smoking underage just ban it like you should not have kids smoking now in Britain there was a lot of consideration of should we ban the sale of smartphones to kids under 14 and and I met with with the the policy unit at at number 10 Downing Street and I said now wait a second guys um you know as an American it never even occurred to me to suggest that um you need to get Norms first if you pass laws that are out of phase with people's Norms they're going to really hate you and they're going to resent it so let's start with a norm change first um and so uh so I think I think that's really happening so in Britain parents are up in arms they really are changing rapidly over there they're a couple months ahead of us in America I think it's happening right now um and so if we just develop a consensus we need to see smartphones in the hands of kids as being like cigarettes in the hands of kids like you know you just don't do that you don't do that of course they can be on a laptop they can be on a computer they can do some things on your iPhone sometimes it's not poison um but you don't want that it to be habit forming so um so I think that for keeping smartphones out of the hands of kids there's no law I don't want a law Banning that but we just need a norm now for for raising the age to 16 we can struggle to do that I'm doing that with my kids I'm saying no for my daughter no Snapchat till you're 16 16 um and she's the only one who doesn't have it it's painful for her and she's 14 um but my hope is that no parent again will be in that situation that in every school a lot of the parents are going to say no no social media till 16 now of course the laws currently state that you have to be 13 in order to sign a contract give away your data and make a deal with a company without your parents knowledge or permission but Congress passed this terrible law in 1998 um uh the Copa child online privacy protection act it was supposed to set the age to 16 which is not which is I think pretty reasonable but it got pushed down to 13 with no enforcement it's the law is written such that as long as the company doesn't absolutely know that you're underage they're fine they're not responsible 13 they're motivated the companies are now the law motivates the companies to not know how old children are there's barely any forbrain at 13 that's right that's right and since all you have to do you just have to be old enough to lie about your age if you're old enough to lie about your age you can go anywhere on the internet because there's no enforcement so I'm saying let's take the age of 13 which is not enforced let's require age verification which is complicated but they're working on that in Britain they've they're mandating that it's going to happen in Britain we'll work out the technical details um so mandate age verification then raise the age to 16 that's the one place where I think we really do need law uh because social media is a social trap and if half the kids are on it there's going to be a lot of pressure on the other half to join so we need to get that down to like only know if 5% sneak around they find a way on that's fine um um so that's where we definitely need law um and then the play stuff there we could use some laws so I I co-founded an organization called let grow if you go to let grow.org um with Lenor skazi we advocate for returning play to children and one of the things we've done is we've gotten laws passed in eight states that say that if you let your child out to play that cannot be taken as evidence of child neglect whereas at present laws are ambiguous so if you send your 8-year-old out to a store and and this has happened to friends of mine and some nosy neighbor says where's your mother does she know you're out here and then they call 911 and the police the police come because no one has seen an 8-year-old un a companied since the 90s so the police come and once the police come they're very likely to refer it to child protective services and once your family is in the grip of Child Protective Services you've got custody battles you've got supervision you're not allowed alone with ch I mean it's crazy what happens so eight states have now said no no more of that this is insane um so we so law could help to put to to stop incentivizing helicopter parenting to provide uh uh more spaces that are safe for kids to play in not car zones um so the book has the ex generation the whole fourth part of it is suggestions for governments for tech companies for schools and for parents there's a lot we can do to restore a play-based childhood in the real world I realize that some of this is dependent on income for a household Etc but is there any protective effect of say a summer camp Oh yes um or protective effect of even just after school sport where both the kids and the parents agree no phones on the field you know we're not we're not taping for every goal I mean I love seeing the my friends kids you know getting a three-pointer at a game or something like that you know I Delight in that on Instagram and it's wild that my friends given who I know them to be growing up um have these kids um and the stories I could tell but but in all seriousness it's wonderful and yet I'm thinking they're taking a video of their kid playing the game um you know wouldn't it be wonderful if there were no phones at after school sports events so it's a couple of hours three times a week or once a week even where at least these young brains are exposed to a different kind of reinforcement burning that's right that's right um the British have a saying don't put your daughter on the stage Mrs Worthington uh which is a line from an old nol coward song and it acknowledges that especially for girls for girls to grow up being looked at and admired and commented on about their looks is just really really bad for them uh but to grow up always being photographed uh everything you do and posted online is really bad for them um so yes in response to your question first summer camps are magic never send your child to a summer camp that doesn't ban phones because this is the best chance you have for a detox and I hear the story over and over again you know my I get my my girl got a an iPhone when she was was 11 she suddenly became sirly no longer the sweet funny child she was I sent her to summer camp the next summer and lo and behold the girl that comes back is my wonderful sweet 11-year-old you know she her personality is back and then she gets back on her phone and she becomes cly again so summer camps are the most powerful technique known um for a detox because the kid isn't being deprived they are in a bunk with other kids with no phones and they're joking and talking and laughing and fighting and doing all those healthy things so summer camp is amazing the other thing that the evidence shows is that team sports and religion those two things are very very protective so I would strongly urge people um to encourage their kids to play team sports my kids run trap which is great but team sports Force more cooperation so there's some evidence that team sports are even better for their mental health um than than individual sports um you don't want super duper over supervised you know high pressure sports leagues I mean that's better than nothing but ideally the more they play games that are you know more intramural in normal the kids are enforcing the rules you know all of that would be better our kids are not rooted in communities anymore but Sports and religion are two things that do that what about music I did an episode on music in the brain and one of the um more thrilling and um interesting parts to me was and I'm I have no musical Talent whatsoever singing or instrumental or otherwise I love listening to music however was that kids that grow up playing an instrument especially cooperatively with other people in a band you know duet or you know quartet you know a band um or orchestra or marching band um there's some very impressive data in terms of potential for additional neuroplasticity in fact the brainwide networks the the patterns of connectivity are much more Broad in kids that learned an instrument and played it cooperatively than um those that try and learn an instrument later in life although they're still advantages that so I wonder if that's could be added to the list yes playing in a band or in a choir I think definitely should be um for a while I was really interested in synchrony and synchrony has all these really powerful effects um there's a wonderful book called keeping together in time by William mcneel uh he was either he signed up or he was drafted into World War II train training at a camp in Texas they're marching up and down with wooden guns because they don't have real guns and at first it seemed stupid to him but after a few days his unit gets it and when they can they they're like they're like a unit they're like like a they're imperfect you know and it was it was like a loss of self it was ecstatic and so he goes off to World War II he writes comes back and writes about you know men in battle he writes that's a different book different book title but but these the but those sorts of being in sync those experiences they we are an ultrasocial species much we're much more social than dogs or chimpanzees we have this ability to keep together in time and do things synchronously and all around the world that's what rituals used to do it's thrilling and so um um these self-transcendent experiences that you get from singing in a choir from playing in a band I don't have much talent either but I did play in a informal rock band when I was at UVA we called ourselves Pavlov's dogs we were all in the psych Department um but the first time we got it and we were all really in sync it was totally thrilling um so yeah the more you give your kids I have whole section actually in Chapter 2 of the book on synchrony and and Attunement um we you know we need to be in sync and that's why face tof face interaction is so important whereas when you're communicating on on Instagram or any social media it's asynchronous you don't have the the automatic Attunement can I get a little new Agy speculative all right let's go I have a question so um I've heard you and others say that you know kids and probably adults nowadays are not familiar with what it is to be bored there's always an input movie um on social media YouTube there's always words streaming at us in audio or written um there's this concept that I love from the world of mindfulness which used to be considered new Agy but now I think every academic campus has at least a few grants focused on meditation and its benefits and respiration breath work and its benefits so we' come a long way but there's this concept of wordlessness of The Importance of Being in states of wordlessness where we're not reading we're not thinking in complete sentences we're not um taking in sensory information and we under those conditions are able to actually register how we feel about things like we become better tuned to um sense our environment and input when it comes and I wonder because my experience of social media has been whether or not kids are on Instagram Snapchat Etc and they're doing it out of whatever compulsion have addiction whatever you want to call it but I'm not sure it feels good to them I'm not sure it does I'm not sure it's like the ice cream that tastes delicious I think it might start that way and occasionally you know they're jackpots right but that in large part adults but since we're talking about kids let's talk about kids in this very critical sensitive period of Life are not feeling good and they might not even know they're not feeling good they're just compulsively there I'm using the term loosely not clinically compulsively engaging and so I wonder whether or not there's some benefit to kids not just being bored for experiencing boredom sake but learning to actually be a better sensor of what they like and don't like because when I talk to my niece or I talk to other young people now they they seem to be like becoming increasingly aware of how much some of the online stuff sucks that's the language they're not like oh it's awesome don't take it away from me they're like I don't want to miss out but it's also painful to them it's I mean it's like they're drinking from a fire hose of nails and then every once in a while there's something that tastes good it's it's not like they're like this is so cool and that's so cool but of course if you give them a really cool video of a animal thing or a social dynamics thing or a war game or whatever they'll get excited but I don't get the impression that they're like this is awesome it's more like this has me by the short hairs it's got me scruffed and I'm just doing it and I don't know how to stop that's that's and that's certainly the way sorry the certainly the way that boys reach out guys young guys typically reach out about their porn addictions I hear about this thousands of messages help me get over this so I refer them to our episode on addiction by Dr Anna lmy from Stanford yeah she's amazing yeah that episode yeah she's she's spectacular or um it's just they're desperate they're desperate so I don't see it as all pleasure I see it as mostly pain that's right so there's a lot going on going on here um for some for some of them they are addicted and they feel bad for the reasons you were talking about dopamine overshoot or they feel bad when they're not doing the addictive activity so they are compulsively using it just like a a gambler if you're addicted to slot machines your life sucks you've spent all your family's money you're ashamed of what happened you feel terrible oh but if I just get back into the Zone on the slot machine I feel good for that two or three hours that's the most dangerous addiction cuz as it's been described to me I'm fortunately not a gambling addict addict excuse me the Gambler really does believe that the next one could change everything right it's going to it's going to cause motivated reasoning it's going to cause hopefulness that is dashed um so for some of them it is a kind of self-medication as soon as the boys move their social lives onto video games and porn and the girls move their social Liv on social media both sexes got really lonely um it's you know they're getting lots of cheap and easy stimulation but it's not satisfying so what do they do now that they're lonely and anxious well sometimes they do more of it um so some of it is driven by that feedback cycle that they're now uncomfortable so they need more of it but the other part is the compulsion to consume because everyone else is and they have to keep up and so my students at myyu I asked them you know okay you know some of you are spending four or five six hours a day on social media why don't you quit oh why I can't because you know I have to know what what everyone's talking about I have to see the latest video I have to keep up with it um and since you know like I can't deal with my email and my text like those two combin that's more than I can handle in a day I can't stand it I can't imagine having five Platforms in addition and most I don't know the exact number but very few of my students are on a single platform most of them are two on two or three regularly plus email and and texting and you know Snapchat um so it is kind of like like imagine you know food is great but imagine always having to eat you have to always be eating like our system can't handle that you know imagine a plant always in a shower like the you know it's always like no you need you need times of taking in and Times of digesting or processing um one of the most valuable uh I'll I'll tell you two of the most valuable exercises that we do in my flourishing class at myu the first is uh a prerequisite to everything else is they have to regain control of their attention and once they understand that they've given away almost all of their attention any moment that isn't taken up by you know a teacher or something is it's it's the phone for a lot of them because there's so much to process they have so many direct messages so many group texts they have to always be processing or they they feel like they you know they're they're being left behind they're not participating so I make them see you've got to regain control of your attention you've got to shut off almost all notifications you leave on Uber because you want Uber to interrupt you to say the car is 3 minutes away that's good but how many other companies is it that important that they interrupt you very very few so shut off almost all your notifications get social media off your phone if you need to use it you can use it on your computer but don't always have it so in every like you know at at NYU in any elevator as students students get on the elevator the phone comes out because that's like 30 seconds and it's awkward take the phone out scroll I would argue the professors too yeah that's true we do not you I'm spend time with you in an elevator yet but no we do we do but it's it's it's less it's yeah yeah um and then the other one that I did um that I is really memorable and I talk about this in the book um is an a walk and um I got this idea my friend daker Kelner he and I did research on a long ago and he really continued he wrote this amazing book called a um and there was great episode if you just Google uh Kelner and uh tippet so with Christa tippet he did this great discussion he talks about um how he used all walks to help him process his brother's early death from cancer and just walking in a beautiful environment walk a little more slowly than usual don't have anything in your ears don't be listening to music don't even bring your phone and just notice and it's magical it's amazing what happens when you do that um and for a lot of my students they've never done that because they have to take in so much stuff if I'm going from point A to point B of course I'm going to be listening to a podcast or or or you know scrolling on my phone while I'm walking and a lot of them they really had these transformative experiences you know we're right on Washington Square Park at myu where around Washington Square Park which is a gorgeous gorgeous Park it's really one of the most beautiful in America certainly one of the most beautiful Urban Parks I'd say um and the students who did their all walk through the park a lot of them have these just amazing experiences it's almost like like a like their heart is opening they feel more love for people they their anxiety goes down and so ever since they and so I did that myself and when I signed it I did it too and I had that sort of experience so now you know I I love my airpods they're amazingly convenient but I listen listen to them a lot less now like when when I'm walking in New York City I often just just nothing just nothing just look process think so yes I think young people are taking in way too much stuff total quantity of btes is just you know 10 times what it should be and they don't have time to process they don't have time they to develop an interior life to to think things through so we just got to cut it cut it way back if I step back from everything that you've said thus far and it's in your book it seems as if until 2012 or so what was rewarded in youth set us up for a more adaptive adulthood but now everything that's being rewarded in youth except from schools and teachers and parents but what's you know being rewarded on a momentto moment basis for Mo the majority of the Waking Life of these young people is maladaptive yeah that's right I mean it's it's so Stark that's right think about it this way um and imagine that your children are having a life out in the real world they're having Adventures they're doing things they're building forts in the forest they're doing all sorts of things and then one day you know a casino opens up nearby and it welcomes all the kids and that's where they spent all their time is in a casino and they're in the care of a company that is trying to extract as much money as it can from them and that's what they do eight or 10 hours a day it's an Abomination to think that a casino could own our children's childhood what if it wasn't a casino what if it was a brothel for the for the boys would be more of Interest let's say like again inconceivable that we would let that happen but what we've done is we've said well what if it's Snapchat what if it's Instagram what if it's Facebook well not so much Facebook what if it's Tik Tok these companies these are the some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world they essentially own our children's childhood this is where childhood is taking place on a few giant PL for-profit platforms who that use an Advertising based business model so they are motivated like the Cino to keep them in don't have a clock don't let them see what time it is keep them in don't let them click over to a link to another site keep them in um we somehow have seeded our children's childhood to Giant companies that have shown that they don't really care about our kids welfare they care much more about profitability and and they care about their customers who are the advertisers and these companies have been granted a special RIT from the King Congress said in in in the in section 230 of the communications decency act in 1996 I think it was Congress said oh and nobody sue you nobody can sue you for what you show to their kids uh there was a reason for that that you don't want AOL to be responsible for everything anyone posts but it's been so broadly interpreted that so far any attempt to regulate social media or any attempt to sue them is seen as like no no so you know it's just we somehow slipped into this and once you see it that way that it's as though our kids are being raised in hara's Casino you know like like no we've got to stop this last year I had the opportunity to speak to to some of the groups at these companies that are assigned to controlling the well-being of the young people that use their platforms and the major emphasis was on the type of content so protecting them against child Predators protecting them against pornography um but as you recall at the beginning of the conversation we broke things down into variables of time specific content Dynamics and maybe the visual interface itself I think for sake of today's discussion the visual interface is probably the least interesting but I can just tell you looking things up close uh a lot not good the eyeball lengthens you become nearsighted which is why spending two hours outside um even if on a tablet has been shown to offset myopia and oh wow thousands of people children anyway there's that piece but the time piece is interesting right maybe limiting the total amount of time on social media obviously the content issue is it only takes one exposure to a video of the sort that you described The Gauntlet I never want to see it whatever has to be done to my phone so that I never see it please uh let me know um but it just seems as if this has been allowed to it's like it's almost like an IV drip of glucose or something happening in the background we're saying okay just stay rigged up to um the glucose trip and then we wonder why we're end up with let's just say cognitively uh obese children yeah that's right the whenever there's New Media um The public's emphasis is always on the content and and so with television the emphasis was well violence on TV is this going to make them violent and it turns out not really watching violent on violence on TV doesn't really make you violent and video games these violent video games these firstperson shooter games are these going to make our kids into killers and there was a lot of research on that it looks like no it doesn't really it doesn't really do that and so many researchers then say see it's just a moral Panic it's okay but that is but that's focusing on the content and this was the great lesson from Marshall mclan and Neil Postman and all these great media theaters in the 20th Century um mcluen said the medium is the message don't Focus so much on the content of Television focus on the transformation of human life when the television becomes the family Hearth and people sit around watching it now from our vantage point today that's pretty darn social they're sitting with their family members together ex having an experience but mcl's point was that's the transformative thing the the what the technology does it's not the content and so in the same way a life on social media in some ways it's like television you're watching stuff but it's much more behaviorist with television you didn't have the constant I do something I'm rewarded I do something I'm rewarded so so social media is much much more addictive than television ever was that's one aspect of the uh television is not performative it doesn't make you live your life in front of a camera you're not in front of a camera you're a passive recipient whereas social media puts our kids in front of a camera um so in all these ways we we get distracted and and this is the the way you know in those Senate hearings uh it was all focused on content you know can't we can't we reduce the you know the number of beheading videos and the child pornography suppose we you know can't we reduce that by 90% wouldn't that be great you know Senator we have the you know World leading technology and doing this um yes that would be nice to for our kids to see less hardcore porn and and less violent videos that would be nice but if if we could make Instagram just be happy girls living beautiful lives and our daughters were to watch 8 hours a day of this is that good for them hell no so you know it is important to clean up the content but for kids going through puberty I think the only real answer is just delay just don't let them do that how much of the issue here is modeling of what adults are doing and um you know and how terrible are or good are adults at modulating their behavior I say modulating because you know I see a lot of parents um videotaping everything that they're you know on the phone all the time in line at the store while their kids are around you know and one of the reasons I think parents like divices so much is that it's a terrific uh lowc cost zero cost um babysitter it allows them to then go be on their phones or do other things yeah so young children are sometimes copying their parents young children are looking for things to copy uh and you know and so I I've got some slides in my regular book lecture of toy iPhones that we give to Tod ERS so they can be just like Mommy and Daddy um for little kids I think it might matter for teenagers you know I'm very often asked that question because and I think it's because parents they feel a little guilty like they know that they're modeling bad behavior and they're worried like is this setting up my kid for doing that and I can't say for sure but my intuition as a social psychologist is not really not very much and the reason is because you know while your kids once looked up to you and they once copied you like by the time they're 12 13 14 you know if I pick up if I start reading you know the economist Ma magazine where if I start knitting or whatever that's not going to make my 14-year-old daughter want to do those things because I'm doing them she is completely focused on what her peer group thinks of her of course she is that's that's the nature of teenage food they're moving away from the family they're trying to make their way on their own in a pure group Lisa deur is is great on on these issues um so I don't you know it would be nice if parents could improve their phone habits and boy phones at the table that's an important place that is a very important Place get across the idea that when we're eating we're with each other we're looking at each other and we're tasting our food we're experiencing the food so actually there modeling Collective behaviors like a meal I think that is actually very very valuable but if it's just that you know you're often multitasking you're often on your phone yeah you know be nice if you didn't but that's not going to push your kid over into phone addiction so the list of four things that you provided are terrific they are somewhat enforcement focused um as I recall and maybe this is not true but as I recall one of the ways that uh media was effective in getting kids to stop smoking was to pit them against these um wealthy old white men who were in rooms filled with smoke writhing their hands together cackling about the amount of money they were making stealing um the health of young people whereas telling teenagers that smoking was bad for them did very so is there a way to create a rebellion of ss against the smartphone um because kids love to Rebel teens love to Rebel not but first of all they don't anymore um oh no really but they're just they're just much more passive I don't think they they're they're Authority focused they're not as rebellious as as they used to be that's disappointing yeah now of course now we'd have to pit them against a group of you know young white men who are owning the social media companies I suppose um but you know this is this addiction is very different from tobacco or anything else tobacco is biologically addictive um and you can't get an entire High School addicted biologically at least it's very it didn't happen um in the peak year of smoking was 1997 37% of American High School students smoked two-thirds didn't but with social media you couldn't have that you couldn't have just a third it's either none or everybody and it's everybody and it happens in middle school so the Dynamics of a social media addiction are so it's a social addiction more than a more than a like you know biochemical like nicotine or cocaine type type addiction so I think the way to break out isn't hey these people are exploiting you that might be helpful we should definitely study that I think the way to break out is okay look you guys actually you can see what this is doing to you you mostly agree that this is wasting your time it's garbage you you want to way out but you just feel like you can't there's such resignation um but look the cool kids over there they have flip phones and they're out like every day after school they're like you know they're doing stuff they're down at you know they're in the mall they're they're getting pizza they're you know building a fort uh you know whatever depending on the age um so I think the way out is to give kids an exciting childhood kids are so lonely now and and they they don't have much in the way of Adventure they don't have much in the way of Thrills um you know you know I live I live in New York City um you know I would start I would like bring my kids out to Coney Island when they were you know 9 10 years old bring them out and then I would just say I'm just going to sit here you guys run around you guys go have fun like I'm not going to be with you you know you know yeah there's a chance you'll get kidnapped or struck by lightning although lightning is more likely um so and then it you know and then it got once they were you know in more you know like like 13 now they can actually take the subway out to Coney Island with a friend so um that's cool I think that's the way to do it don't make it like we're going to take away all this stuff from you hahah now you have nothing to do make it more like I'm not trying to hurt you here I want you to have fun the way I did and the way your grandparents did we all had human F childhoods full of Adventure I want that for you and I think most gen Z will Embrace that they just don't want to do it alone so the key is if you're listening to this podcast and if you have kids that are in elementary middle school be sure to talk with the parents of your kids friends so if if you want to make some changes in your phone policies if four families do it together now your kids's not going to feel left out or deprived and be sure to give them something give them say here you know what every how about every Friday let's call it free free play Friday no piano lessons on Friday no nothing on Friday Fridays you all get together you can start at anyone's house go out do what you want we'll even you know we'll give you you know we'll give you more allowance or we'll give you money to spend but go have experiences then it's fun it's not deprivation I love the uh trust in kids to sort things out and to be safe enough um at least the statistics say that they're more likely to thrive under those conditions than to be kidnapped or have something terrible happen I I like it also because it merges uh your previous book codling of the American mind um with the current book The anxious generation I have a bunch of other questions um but I think the most important one at this stage is how optimistic or pessimistic are you about the changes that you're hoping for and then the second question is how can we all help I mean you you mentioned these four action items no smartphone before high school no social media until 16 phone free schools and to Foster this exploration and Independence um and we will propagate those four things as far and wide as we can but I think everybody parents and kids I'm sure as well want to know like what can we do so um optimism scale zero being like you you're doing this as a last Stitch effort but it it's hopeless well you wouldn't be here if you thought it was hopeless so one to 10 one being just a sliver of Hope 10 being you know we got this same way we got other stuff I'm a 10 you're a 10 10 10.0 yeah and the reason is because I've never seen a situation like this I've been involved in a lot of efforts to change attitudes I ran a gun control group uh in college when I was you know 20 and that was impossible and I've been involved in political campaigns you're trying to persuade people and you can't get their attention and how do you mess them and it's really hard that's the way anybody involved in social change has experienced that that's most things this is like you drop a spark and everything goes everything it just goes everywhere um so all over the world all over the developed World family life has become a fight over screen time almost every parent of a kid over two recognizes this we all hate it we're sick of it and we've just been confused the only real push back I've got I've gotten two guys one is I am in a normal academic debate with about seven or eight research who say there's not evidence of causality I I believe there is I you know we're we're you know marshalling evidence against each other but but by and large almost everyone seems persuaded because they already knew this they already thought it they already saw it and what I've done with the book is just given them some psychological Concepts and some clear labels and a way out and I'm so confident in part because the revolution started in Britain in February um yes they drew on some of my older articles but this was before my book came out um parents are self-organizing in Britain the government is acting they actually have a functioning legislature in Britain and the and the the government has has led efforts to pass laws as well um so I know it's working in Britain um and I see it happening here now at a massive scale um the point of the book is collective action and parents all over the country are heeding that they're forming reading groups they're going in in a group to talk with the principal the principls and teachers they all hate the phones it makes their lives impossible they want a phone-free school but they were afraid of the few parents who freak out if they can't text their child during class if the schools are overwhelmed by parents saying please lock up the phones please let my child have six hours a day when she can listen to the teacher instead of do more Tik Tok um so I am I'm very very confident that childhood is going to look very different within two years I don't mean that it won't be seven-year-olds on phones but in the same way that we flipped on smoking we used to think it was okay to smoke in an airplane uh we used to think it was okay to smoke in restaurants it was okay to smoke everywhere we thought um and now we don't we don't think that anymore that took a long time to change but it did change I think because of the public disgust with seeing children just spending their childhood looking at a screen and because the public disgust with what we've heard about meta and and Tik Tok and a few of the other companies um I think within two years it's going to be widespread it'll be a norm that you just don't give kids social media in particular I mean iPads are complicated because you know you want kids you to watch movies is okay stories are good I'm not saying the you know iPad is a terrible thing but um our attitudes about this are going to change radically um and I think the great majority of schools are going to be phone free within two years um and we're going to see we're already seeing more kids outside lot every day I get I get emails from Greatful parents saying you know because of your book me know my six-year-old he wanted to ride his bicycle down to the end of our cesac he wanted to ride down Circle and come back and I never would let him because I was afraid that what what would the neighbors say but once I read your book I decided to let him and he was so ecstatic he kept doing it and doing it and now he's going further and he rides to his friends houses so people in her neighborhood now they're seeing a kid on a bicycle and if Suppose there were 10 kids doing it well now it's normal so we can renormalize human childhood in the real world where our kids get the chance to have independent adventures and learn how to be self-supervised adults ultimately we can do this okay so you're a 10 out of 10 on the optimism scale what can we do to facilitate and accelerate this whole process so once we understand that this is a collective action problem that we're all stuck in this because everyone else is stuck and we can't leave if we're the only ones once we understand that now you see the the the key is collective action and so or talk to your friends about this talk about the book with them you don't have to buy the book just go to anxious generation.com we have all kinds of resources I have video you I have talks where I've summarized the book in in videos um talk about it with your with your friends talk about it with your family uh uh talk about with other parents at the school if you're on social media social media is great for adults who want to pursue projects I just don't think it's good for kids to be pursued by the social media companies but if you're Instagram in particular that's where a lot of parents are especially mothers um talk about these issues say you're going to let your kid have some freeer range childhood you're going to try to do these for Norms um and then if you're able I hope that you'll support the projects um if you go to anxious generation.com there's a donate button um NYU has it set up so that people can donate into a research account for me and that's what I use to hire to pay my small staff I have about 4 five people working for me and I hope to grow that to 10 um I hope people donate to to me at anxious generation.com or to let grow um this wonderful organization that that advocates for giving playback and Independence back to kids let grow.org um and if you know influential people if you know state legislators um not a lot of there is some oh and in Congress there is a very important bill kosa the kids online safety act contact your legislators about that say you support kosa it could be coming up for a vote very very soon this is the one piece that really could get through the US Congress beyond the Congress a lot of states are acting which is very very EX in so make your views known to your state legislators if you know them or the mayor or Governor if you know them um this is a collective action trap the only way out is together so if we act together we can break this terrific and we'll put links to all of those things you just mentioned in the show note captions Jonathan you're bringing the humanity back uh it's it's remarkable and you know as a fellow academic I have to say your depth of scholarship in terms of developing and researching these ideas but also the Vigor and the mission that you have around doing good and making sure that it happens soon as opposed to waiting another 10 years and seeing just how bad this this can get um is really inspiring um I feel it I know for sure that people listening and and watching feel it and so I want to thank you for doing this work uh again I loved coddling in American mind because it just woke me up to how how much things had changed and were changing and it's such an important book and the anxious generation is truly an important book and I don't say that lightly um it's Mission driven goal driven and it has actionable items that I'm certain many people listening to this are going to um partaken so on behalf of the listeners and viewers and also myself but also the positive change to come I just want to say thank you for taking the time out of your very busy schedule you're still a professor you're also public facing health science educator like you yeah so um I feel like kinship there uh for coming here and speaking with us today and we'll provide links to the books and to these other resources in the show note captions and would love to have you back again um hopefully in the not too distant future so that we can review all the progress that you've stimulated so thank you so much well thanks so much Andrew and thanks for all the work that you do to bring to make science cool and interesting um so I really appreciate your work and and I'm very grateful for you to you for having me on it's been a pleasure thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Jonathan height to learn more about Andor to support Dr Height's work and to find a link to his important new book The anxious generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness please see the links in the show note captions and if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel you can also subscribe to the podcast by following on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and Apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or you have guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the hubbin Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments if you're not already following me on social media I am huberman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram Twitter now known as X LinkedIn threads and Facebook and on all those platforms I cover science and science-based tools some of which overlap with the content of the ubberman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the hubman Lab podcast so again that's hubman lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter the neural network newsletter is a zeroc cost monthly newsletter that provides hubman Lab podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief 1 to three page PDFs with everything from neuroplasticity and learning to how to optimize your sleep or optimize your dopamine we have protocols for deliberate cold exposure and deliberate heat exposure we have a foundational Fitness protocol that spells out resistance training and cardiovascular training in detail all of which is available at zero cost you simply go to huberman lab.com go to the menu tab scroll down to newsletter and provide your email and I should point out that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Jonathan height and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]