旁白: You are actively rewiring your brain for the worst by engaging with social media, high volume, quick videos.

Jonathan: And the social media executives don't let their kids use this stuff because they designed it to be addictive and they know that millions and millions of kids have been cyberbullied, sexed. Many have committed suicide. So, I'm getting angry.

Adi: And then from the medical perspective, it's rewiring your body, increasing your risk of heart disease and PTSD.

Stephen: We've moved too far into the virtual world and the results are catastrophic. People are spending roughly about 6 and a half hours a day on their phones. What do we do about this?

Stephen: Well, here's the amazing thing. We actually can control our fate. So, we are joined by a social psychologist and a Harvard physician to dive into the technology addiction and brain rot crisis billions are facing worldwide and how we can counter its devastating mental health effects. You have to reclaim your attention because without the ability to pay attention for several minutes at a time, we're seeing the destruction of human potential, the human relationships, the connection.

Adi: But there's all these small tweaks that you can do to override that primal urge to scroll. For example, 91% of people had an improvement in attention, well-being, and mental health. After just 2 weeks of continuing to use your device, but not having internet access. Next, keep your phone out of your arms reach because the sheer potential for distraction has actually been shown to change your prefrontal cortex, which is called brain drain.

Jonathan: So, yes, we should exert more self-control, but we're being pushed in addictive apps and it's messing us all up. That's not our fault.

Stephen: Would you advise people to delete these short form videos?

Jonathan: Oh my god, yes, that would the most important thing you can do for your intelligence and for humanity. But if I was going to offer some specific advice, here are the three things that I do with my students to reclaim retention. And then to add to that, I have the 3 second brain reset. So, first

Stephen: I wanted to ask you guys what you thought of this.

视频片段: Hey, you're back.

视频片段: This terrifies me.

视频片段: We've got to stop this now.

Stephen: Guys, I've got a quick favor to ask you. We're approaching a significant subscriber milestone on this show, and roughly 69% of you that listen and love this show haven't yet subscribed for whatever reason. If there was ever a time for you to do us a favor, if we've ever done anything for you, given you value in any way, it is simply hitting that subscribe button. And it means so much to myself, but also to my team, cuz when we hit these milestones, we go away as a team and celebrate. And it's the thing, the simple, free, easy thing you can do to help make this show a little bit better every single week. So, that's a favor I would ask you. And, um, if you do hit the subscribe button, I won't let you down. And we'll continue to find small ways to make this whole production better. Thank you so much for being part of this journey. Means the world. And uh yeah, let's do this.

Stephen: Jonathan, I've heard you say that the destruction of attention is the largest threat to humanity that's happening around the world. And I've also heard you say that short form videos are the worst of the worst because they're shattering attention spans. The reason why I wanted to have this conversation today is somewhat personal. And in fact, all of the conversations have in the driver are somewhat personal to some degree. um they're inspired by some unanswered question I have in my head and also some observation I have in my life and the observation I've had is that short form videos in particular are making my life worse and actually I've got to say the catalyst moment really where I thought you know I need to get you exceptional people together to have this conversation was I thought this I then looked at my screen time and saw a huge change I felt so much worse because all these social platforms have short form video now and then I actually heard Elon Musk who you know has a social media platform that does short form video say that he thinks it's one of the worst inventions for humanity.

Jonathan: Yeah, because I wrote a whole book called The Anxious Generation focusing on teen mental health. That was the mystery that popped up in the mid200s. Why are people born after 1995 so much more anxious and depressed? And I've been tracking down that mystery and it points a lot of it points to social media and especially Instagram, social comparison, all the things we know about social media. When the book came out in 2024, since then what I realized is that I vastly underestimated the damage because I focused on mental health, which is a catastrophe. But the bigger damage is the destruction of the human ability to pay attention. Without the ability to pay attention for several minutes at a time, ideally 10 or 20 minutes at a time. Without that, you're not going to be of much use as an employee. You're not going to be of much use as a spouse. You're not going to be successful in life. And that's when I realized this is way beyond mental health. This is changing human cognition, changing human attention, and possibly on a global scale.

Stephen: Adi, what perspective do you come at this from? And what's been your perspective through all the work you've done about brains and stress and neuroscience and all these kinds of things that has shaped the way that you think about social media, screen time, short form video.

Adi: My background is that I'm a physician at Harvard and it my expertise is in stress, burnout, and mental health. And so that is the lens that I view all of this through. We know that the most delletterious relationship that you have is with your device. You know, in every healthy relationship, we have boundaries. We have boundaries with our kids, our parents, our colleagues, our, you know, wi-i with our friends. And yet, we have no boundaries and often poorest boundaries when it comes to the relationship you have with your device. So, it's not so much about, you know, becoming a digital monk and renouncing technology because technology can serve us, right? It inspires, educates, connects. Now more than ever, it's so important to be an informed citizen, but not at the expense of your mental health. And so what Jonathan was saying, this, you know, constant being engaged with your devices, with social media, the scrolling from the minute you wake up until you go to bed, there's a reason why you have your best ideas in the shower. And that's because that's the only place in the whole day where you are not with your device. People take their device to the bathroom. They sleep with your device. you eat with your device, people walk down the street. There's more near miss pedestrian accidents because people are walking while they're crossing the street and um looking at their devices. And so there's all of this brain biology at play behind the scenes. So both of you have talked about how it doesn't feel good to engage and constantly be on your phone, that sense of infinite scroll, but there is, you know, it feels like you're doing nothing. You're just doing this, right? What are you doing? But in fact, it is not passive. It is active. And it has a profound effect on your biology, on your brain, on your psychology, and also social factors that I hope we talk about today.

Stephen: You know, scrolling, wasting a bit of time doesn't seem so harmful. What is the big, if we play this forward 10, 20, 30 years, what is the big risk or threat?

Adi: The biggest threat right now, we don't even have to wait 20 years, is that it through a process called neuroplasticity, which is just a big fancy word that simply means that your brain is a muscle, is that by engaging with social media, that that sense of high volume, lowquality, quick videos, you are actively rewiring your brain for the worse. So you're increasing your sense of stress, worsening your mental health, attention, cognition, distractability, irritability, complex problem solving. All of that changes when you engage in engage in that infinite scroll.

Jonathan: Yeah. I'd like to add on here because one of the main arguments I get is, ah, this is what they said about television. Oh, this is what they said about comic books. This is just another moral panic. But people need to understand why touchscreen devices are so different from television. And so I think parents find this helpful if I just lay this out briefly. Good screen time versus bad screen time. So humans are storytelling animals. We have always, as long as we've had language, we've raised our kids with stories, epic poems, all kinds of stories. Stories are good. Sto the human brain needs lots of patterns. The child's brain needs lots of patterns to develop. So the worst thing you can do is hand your child the device because they're crying for it because they've been they trained to get it and you're busy. So you have hand them the device. They're quiet. What's happening? They're sitting alone. Not, you know, when I was a kid, we always watch with my sisters, with my friends. You're arguing about it. You're talking at social kids sitting alone with a device in his hand. It's not long stories. It's never long stories. It always ends up at YouTube shorts or Tik Tok or Instagram reels for older kids. So, they're doing they're doing this. But here's the key thing that it does that a television does not. A television puts you in a state that psychologists call transportation. You get into a story and you find yourself pulled in and you're rooting for the characters and this is this is how a brain gets tuned up to social patterns but it can't happen in 10 seconds. It can't happen in one minute. It takes a long period of time and there is no reinforcement. There is no the television doesn't do anything to you. You don't have any response. Whereas a touchscreen device is a Skinner box. So BF Skinner was one of the founders of behaviorism and he put rats and pigeons in a box where he could deliver a reinforcement, a little grain of food on a schedule. And by giving them quick reinforcements for behavior, he could train them to do amazing tricks in just a few hours. When you give your kid a touchscreen device, it's stimulus response, swipe, get a reward or not, variable ratio. And then and and you just keep doing that. So you are, as Adi said, it is rewiring your brain. It's not just wasting time. It is literally training you to do things where television didn't do that. So this is a whole new game.

Adi: And to add to that, you know, from the medical perspective, you're shortening this attention span. And what happens over time is so like Jonathan said, right, you're not sleeping as well because you are engaged with your device. We know that 80% of people are checking their phones within minutes of waking up. We have something called revenge bedtime procrastination. this concept of, you know, at the end of the day you're fatigued, you've had a long day, you've had no me time, and you want to get to bed early. We all know, by the way, what the data is that, you know, we've been taught since we were little kids, right? Like bedtime, sleep is important, it's good for your body, it's good for your brain. And we might have all the knowledge in the world, but in terms of action, there's a wide gap between knowledge and information and action. And so revenge, bedtime procrastination is kind of an offshoot. So what happens? So, you know, you have that decreased attention. You have that irritability, hypervigilance. And so, at night, at the end of the day, it's 9:00 p.m. You finally, you know, if you're a parent, your kids are asleep, your kitchen is clean, maybe you finish your entrepreneurial day, and you finally sit down with Melanie on the couch, and you're like, "H, some me time." And, you know, you want to get to bed early, and you know it's good for you. But then suddenly, you're scrolling and before you know it, it's 2 a.m. and you're saying, "Oh my god, what happened? Why am I still awake? What was I doing all this time?" What happens is that you essentially give yourself some me time at night and so you procrastinate bedtime. And so what happens is with this revenge bedtime procrastination, it affects your sleep and then when you don't have good sleep, good quality sleep, so you have difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, sleep debt over time for kids, for adults has all sorts of ramifications. So this is just the tip of the iceberg. this short form video content and the ripple effects go far and wide. Not only is it rewiring your brain, it's rewiring your body, it is affecting your sleep, which increases your risk of heart disease later in life. And u when you're consuming graphic videos and graphic images, it can increase your personal risk of PTSD through vicarious trauma even if you weren't there. So, this is just a vast network of things that can happen to you simply because you're thinking, "Yeah, it's harmless. What is it? It's just a bunch of videos that I'm checking out. It's a way for me to decompress."

Stephen: What do I need to know about the nature of the brain to understand exactly what short form video is is playing, is hijacking, is taking advantage of

Jonathan: the thing to understand about all of this is that we have to focus on childhood. Why do we have childhood? Um, humans have this really interesting childhood where we we grow rapidly at first and then we slow down for about five or seven years. We don't grow very quickly and then we speed up at puberty. Whereas other primates, they just grow and grow till they reach reproductive age, then they reproduce. But we seem to have this long period of sort of middle childhood for cultural learning. It's a period in which the the kid is now walking and talking and turning away from the parents and and that's a time for this to come in and they pay attention and they form relationships. All these things have to happen slowly because the neurons are gradually growing. They're finding each other based on what the child is doing. Okay? So, we grow up in the real world and and that happens over time. And a lot of that is very physical. Kids are very physical. Mammals are very physical and there's a lot of touch. So, that's a healthy human childhood. But when you give an iPad or your old iPhone and they can they begin doing the the touching and swiping, that is going to hijack their attention. That is going to push out all other forms of action and learning. And that is going to change the way the parts of the brain that learn to pay attention, what's called executive function. It's going to change the way the brain learns to pay attention. It's going to change the reward circuits. I think you had Analy recently who's the nation's expert on addiction. And the way that she describes it, how, you know, any one addiction is going to change your reward pathways to make you more vulnerable to other addictions. So, we're setting our kids up not just for this, but then when they get a little older, it'll be video games, it'll be uh porn, it'll be gambling now. Everything is gambling. So, we're setting them up for a life in which their brain is saying, "Give me something. Give me some quick dopamine. Give me some quick dopamine. I don't want I don't want to have to work for anything. I don't want to have to apply myself for an hour and then get a reward." And so the what the what the short videos are doing for kids is preventing them from learning the connection between hard work and a reward.

Stephen: Is there anything else I need to know from a neuroscience perspective about what's going on in my brain when I'm when I develop these addictions with short form videos or these sort of quick dopamineic tasks.

Adi: So we all as humans have a primal urge to scroll. When you feel a sense of stress, as many of us do in this moment in life, it is your sense, you know, your amygdala. And so it's your sense of self-preservation. It's survival and self-preservation. That is what your amydala does. So if you want me to show you here, I have no idea what I'm doing there.

Jonathan: Yeah, it's okay. So here, deep here, it's a small almond shaped structure. And that is your amygdala. And your amygdala, its main purpose is survival and self-preservation. It houses your stress response, your fight orflight response, and it is truly what is activated when you are engaging in content, when you feel a sense of stress. And so you have this primal urge to scroll. And so evolutionarily we when we all were caves people living um together, we would sleep at night and there would be a night watchman scanning for danger. And now we have our we have become our own night watchman. And so we scan for danger all day, all night long. How do we do that? We scroll. And then the amydala is triggered. And then you scroll some more. And you scroll some more. And you scroll some more. And so over time, what you're doing is that you're making that amygdala in a state of of chronic. It's continually being triggered. What happens to the amygdala over time. When it's continually triggered, it starts to rewire your brain in other ways. And how does it do that? Through something called the prefrontal cortex. If you put your hand I like I can use this model, but I can also just use my hands. When you put your hand on your forehead, the area right behind your forehead right here is the prefrontal cortex. This is a very important thing for our conversation. This area of the brain and what the prefrontal cortex does is it is called it governs executive functions. So impulse control, memory, planning, organization, strategic thinking, complex problem solving and there is a tension between your amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. When your amydala is in the driver's seat, that prefrontal cortex is quiet. And what is happening as we continue to engage with our devices and have this primal urge to scroll, that amydala upregulates and the prefrontal cortex downregulates. And over time, that is very problematic for all of the reasons that we're kind of introducing at the start of this conversation. There was a meta analysis done in 2025 of 71 different studies and it found that heavy short form video use was associated with reduced thinking ability, especially shorter attention spans and weaker impulse control.

Jonathan: That's right. These studies are just beginning to roll in now. Um, kids have been on social media really a lot since 2008, but especially once they got smartphones around 2012. studies began coming in uh in the 2010s that um look it's looking like the kids who are spend a lot of time on this um are doing much worse. They're more depressed. The focus was on depression. And some other researchers said no, it's just a correlation. You you can't prove causation. And we've been going around and around on this for about 10 or 15 years. Now we're doing the same thing with uh with the short form videos. The damage everyone can see. My students tell me this is what's happening. We feel it. studies are coming in, but there will be a few studies here and there that don't show it and people will uh push that up. Meta spends a lot of time and money to influence the public debate. A lot of public documents are coming out now about how they do that. So, we can engage in debate over over research on short form videos for 5 or 10 years, but at that point, it's way too late. We've lost a second generation, Gen Alpha. So, I think when we're talking about kids especially, we need to have what's called the precautionary principle, which is if there's reason to think that this is hurting kids, how about we don't roll it out into every childhood? How about we make these companies responsible? We hold them responsible for what they're doing to kids because we're about to make the same mistake we made with social media, letting it worm its way into childhood. We have already done that with short videos, and we're about to do it with AI chat bots. In fact, we're just beginning it in late 2025, I'd say. I I don't think people quite realize how much these major social media platforms have figured out that short form video sells. Um we're actually seeing this sort of global rise in short form drama apps now. And I don't know if you guys have seen these apps, but it basically takes a movie that used to be 2 hours long and it breaks it down into say 60 different parts. And my a colleague of mine at my company was showing me the other day in different parts of the world they're exploding. There's been a 190% increase in short form drama apps. takes long form movie, turns it into short form videos. Disney Plus plans to introduce AI generated short form videos this year, starting with 30 secondond limits inside the Disney Plus app. And Techrunch also reported that as of October 2025, Netflix tested short form video content on phones and recently announced its plan to expand this feature. It appears that all of the content we consume is going that way. And listen, I'm friends with lots of people at big social media platforms. um this doesn't get me in the doesn't sound in my way of criticizing them because I think two things can be true at the same time right so I think it can be true that I have a podcast and I make short form videos and that I also understand that there's a real downside to them and um all of the major social social media platforms that I speak to speak to have a huge drive towards short form video it is it appears to be their number one strategic priority and obviously because of the success of Tik Tok as of January 2026 Tik Tok I believe is the most downloaded social app in the world now and it and and if I'm running a social media company and my one focus is profit,

Stephen: I'm now faced with an existential crisis.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Stephen: I either take part in this thing that is driving the highest retention, therefore the best ad payouts or I die.

Adi: So there's two comments to that. first off is that you know when we think when we think about social media and how society is shapeshifting to allow this short form content there is a concept that Jonathan and I briefly mentioned I think prior to us filming called second screen viewing and so what's happening is that allegedly these big streamers are asking their creative talent whether it's screenwriters or actors or pe directors to replay to reiterate the plot because as you're watching, you know, when we were kids, we would watch TV or movies and you just sit on the couch and you'd have a bucket of popcorn with your family and you'd watch a movie, an hour, hour and a half, two hours and now second screen viewing is happening, which means that you're watching a movie or a TV show and you're on your device and so you are constantly having that fragmented attention and we are all doing it and so what these streamers are allegedly asking their creative talent to do is to reiterate the plot. So it's shapeshifting. It makes sense if my brain is, you know, I'm 33 years old, so I've grown up with a lot of this stuff. If my brain has been wired to have shorter attention spans and and movies from 30 years ago are not going to cut it for me,

Jonathan: right? But then look what happens if if everybody chases that. And I know, look, Netflix is making shorter and shorter stuff. Even TED, the TED conference, TED talks are getting shorter and shorter. What does that do? It just repeats the cycle. Now, I appreciate that you're in a collective action trap, as you put it. If I don't do it and everyone else is, then I lose out. And so, the the business pressure on on all the creators, the business pressures go shorter, shorter, shorter. There's a very useful psychological term distinction here that I think would be helpful, which is the difference between psychological assimilation and accommodation. This goes back to Jean PG, the great developmental psychologist. We we have certain mental structures. We have a a model in our head of how things work. And you know then you learn something new then oh that's a you know kid learns oh that's a an arvar okay I put that into you know that's just that you just assimilate they learn lots of animal names and then they learn something that's doesn't fit like you learn about bacteria and now you have to oh okay now you you have you have to change your mental structure it takes a little time you change your mental structure to understand more about life that's what education really is all about you have to have a lot of assimilation of course but you need that accommodation over and over again That's why you want to go to college. That's why you want to read novels. That's what a great movie does. It takes time. And so, one of the great things about this modern technology is that we can do things like have this three-hour conversation. I can't believe it. People are going to listen to it. So, this, you know, long form content. This is all about accommodation. Anybody who walks out who who who leaves this conversation after 3 hours and isn't thinking about something differently, we failed. Okay. So, you are very much in the accommodation business. That's great. And then the the question both a moral and a strategic question is how much do you need to play the the quick hit game in order to get people there. I leave that to you to do the moral calculation. Maybe it maybe it balances out maybe but uh but I think that's where you are.

Stephen: Would you advise people to delete these short form?

Jonathan: Oh my god. Yes. Of course. Here but here. Yes. That would the most important thing you can do for your intelligence and for humanity would be delete them. So, what I advise my students to do is I say just do this. Just just delete one of the social media apps that you use, especially if it's Tik Tok, just delete from your phone. You can still check on your computer. If someone sends you a video, you can still watch it on your computer. You can even check it, you know, every weekend. You can spend some time on it, but just get it off your phone because on the phone, the phone is always with us. It's an extension of our body. And if it's always there, then it's going to take every it's called attention fracking. It's going to break up your attention. It's going to take every 7 seconds that you're not doing something, you're going to go for the phone. So, the best thing you can do to make yourself smarter and a better partner and a better human, I would say, would be to delete the short, especially any of the short form videos. So, Tik Tok, unfortunately, YouTube, which has a lot of good stuff on it, becomes YouTube shorts. Instagram, which does a lot of terrible things, but people do find it useful for all kinds of purposes, becomes Instagram reels. So, I think the proper amount of short form video for children 0 to 18 is zero. They should never be watching the vertical videos. Parents, don't ever let your kids watch the short vertical videos. You might even if there if only there was a way to put it. Is there a way to put a time limit? You can say it has to be 10 minutes or longer. Kids, you can have an hour YouTube, but it has to be 10 minutes or longer. Nothing shorter than 10 minutes. That at least will get rid of this the quick the quick swiping the the dopamine stuff.

Adi: So I would say that for kids yes like you know not engaging it whatsoever but for someone you know my approach is a little bit different for someone who's like in their 30s or in their 40s and the way I would kind of frame that is

Adi: instead of renouncing you know saying I'm going to get it off my device and I'm going to check on a desktop which is great there's c little kind of tweaks that we could do because my approach is to foster that sense of empowerment in one to help them make positive change. And so one strategy that you could use if you are saying there's no way I'm getting rid of my I'm not deleting these apps from my phone, right? If you're by the way, I practice what I preach and I really do don't engage in technology as to the best of my ability. Um but one thing that you could do is grayscale your phone. And so especially at night like it's 9:00 p.m. like we talked about revenge bedtime procrastination. You know that you're going to do it. you're going to sit down and you're going to scroll and before you know it, it's 2 am. Instead, grayscale your phone. This simple switch. You can toggle it. I have my phone set to grayscale, which simply means that you're getting rid of your color, making it black and white. And so, when it is grayscaled, then you, you know, it doesn't have that same addictive quality to it. It's like going through a grocery store. A marketing executive described it this way to me. Going through a grocery store instead of the technicolor junk food cereal, it's just black and white. So you have a less there's a greater sense of compulsion to continue checking. So that's like one strategy you could use. And the other is to set some boundaries. So geographical boundaries, keep your phone out of out of your arms reach if you're at a desk if you're a student, not right next to you because we know there's this phenomenon of brain drain. So it's not just that when you're using your phone, it can have a potential distraction, but also just having it close by. It's called brain drain. And um so putting it in a desk drawer, keeping it in another part of the home if you are working, keeping it far away from you. And so you kind of can override that primal urge to scroll, let your prefrontal cortex take hold again. And so there's all these small tweaks that you can do. You you think no.

Jonathan: Yes, there are all these small tweaks you can do and they will make the heroin a little bit less addictive. And yeah, you should try those. But what I can say after teaching this course for many years is that people who try that, they they report, "Yeah, you know, it helped. it helped, but you only really get the transformation when you quit social media that you get your life back. You get hours a day back. So, um, and so I I would urge everyone to just think, you know, you only you only get one childhood, you only get one one young adulthood, and if you're going to spend it scrolling, what do you have to show for it at the end? And when you get people to reflect on, well, how much value do you really get from watching the short videos? What would how would your life be different if you if you knocked it out? Once they realize that their motives for being on it were either just to keep up or because that's what everyone else is doing or as you said, I deserve it because I'm tired. Well, why are you tired? It's in part because your attention was fragmented all day long. So, you only really get the transformations when you get a real change in what you're what you're consuming. Although, of course, yes, setting it to grace will be helpful, but it's not going to be transformative for most people, I believe.

Adi: And then you know based on the science you're there's certain elements like when we think about what is it about the phone that is creating that sense of compulsion. Jonathan is right. So what is it about the phone? It's not just the phone you know you're scrolling you're engaging. There are two studies that were really interesting. One people got off of they they continue to use their devices. They had no internet. So it's like you know I tried this experiment myself in December. I was out of the country and so I just let my, you know, I didn't plug into Wi-Fi and I found, you know, marketkedly a marketked change in my mood, my sleep and I'm not even, you know, 20 years old on TikTok and it was so different. And so this study found that just two weeks of continuing to use your device, but just not having internet access improved your attention, well-being, and mental health. And in this population, it was all adults, it wasn't kids, it was all adults. found that 91% of people had an improvement in at least one of these metrics. And then another study more recently um just one week of not engaging in social media, digital detox they called it, did the same thing. Better you know less anxiety, less depression, decreased insomnia. But my feeling is that you know there is this new kind of meme right like your the millennial urge to delete uh my internet presence and you know live off the grid. There is certainly utility to that and I salute anyone who wants to engage in that analog life more and more but from my from where I sit I feel like we do need to have healthier boundaries and engage more responsibly. It also builds up that muscle and it can help, you know, takes eight weeks to do neuroplasticity. When you're building new brain circuits, it takes eight weeks. Falling off, getting back up is part of habit formation. So, if you're going to make any of these changes, understand that it takes some time. But I I don't know if it is possible for me or for others to say fully, I'm going to, you know, delete off of my phone. But I love that.

Stephen: So, I'd like to go a little further um a little further with this. So, the way you the way you put it, yes, there's all these things that we could do. We should have boundaries, but all of that puts the responsibility on us.

Stephen: So, the way you the way you put it, yes, there's all these things that we could do. We should have boundaries, but all of that puts the responsibility on us.

Adi: Agree.

Jonathan: And that's where we are with junk food. With junk food, we're like, okay, it's out there. We have to learn self-control. We have to teach self-control to our kids. Okay, that's the way it is in this country. But the digital devices, I think, are very, very different. So, imagine if imagine if we sent our kids out into the world and it wasn't just that there was junk food in all the stores. was that everything was made of junk food. You know, you you know, the door handles, you can eat it. It's chocolate. But it's not just that the world's made of junk food. It's they actually can tell they're able to tell what you're craving at the moment. And maybe you're you're more in the mood for salt. So So now it's all potato chips or pretzels. If the world is designed by companies to always give you the thing that will most grab your unconscious desires, will affect the the amydala, the reward centers, that's on them. That's not our fault. My general rule as a social psychologist is if a few people are doing something bad or self-destructive, well, you know, they should learn some self-control or that's something about them. But when 90 or 95% of people are doing something self-destructive, that's because of the companies that put us in an environment that encourages addiction. So, I just want to read a quote. We have so much good stuff coming out from Meta, from all the whistleblowers. Now, all the court cases are beginning in Los Angeles. finally the first time they're going to Meta is going to face a jury with all the parents who've lost kids. Um, so here is here's a a chat. So, we have a lot of internal documents that came out from the the attorneys general that are suing Meta. So, while they're talking about the results of some of their internal research, one of them says, uh, "Oh my gosh, y'all, Instagram is a drug. We're basically pushers. We're causing reward deficit disorder because people are binging on in Instagram so much they can't feel reward anymore." which is something Anna LMKI said like the reward tolerance is so high and then he says I know Adam meaning Adam Oeri I know Adam doesn't want to hear it he freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my teen fundamentals leads review but it is undeniable it's biological and psychological top-down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more. This is not on us. They designed it to be addictive. They've done research to make it maximally addictive. They push it on children. They tried to get Instagram kids for even littleer kids. They know what they're doing. They've done the research. My team, we put together. We found references to 31 internal studies that Meta did. They've done a lot of research finding harm. They bury it, but you can find it at meta's internal research.org. We put it all online. You can read these quotes. So, yes, we should exert more self-control, but basically we're being pushed addictive substances, addictive uh addictive apps, and it's messing us all up.

Adi: I agree wholeheartedly that it is so destructive, and you feel like even with people in their 40s and 50s, and if anyone can do it, it's you, Jonathan. Seriously, I would love to see it. You know, we also know based on the data that these things quite they they reshape our brain, rewire our brain through neuroplasticity and also change our brain waves. So patterns. So we talked about the amydala and the prefrontal cortex, right? But they also change brain waves. And so when you look at studies and the data, it has the reward pathway and dopamine. And these brain patterns, the brain waves mimic addictive behaviors. And you know that there's certain features, right? like when you do swipe down to refresh, it's the slot machine.

Jonathan: It was modeled directly after the slot machine. Yeah.

Adi: Or autoplay or um you know the algorithm that infinite scroll. Um one really interesting kind of like breaking news which you guys may have already heard of. It's like 3 days ago the European Union Commission found Tik Tok to be in breach of the digital services act. And what it said was that it is addictive. it um you know creates compulsion and gets people into this autopilot mode so they have difficulty disengaging and personally I am moving away from social media and really leaning into analog life but I think with the way the world you know it's one of our only ways to connect right meaning I don't mean connect deeply I don't mean connect like in a deep way but be informed to know what's going on in the world etc

Stephen: I I suspect that because we've spent so long criticizing meta over the last 10 years because the biggest in any category takes all the heat. So, OpenAI is taking it now. And what this often does is is it provides cover for other people to go be even more extreme with that behavior while like meta take the heat. And I actually think this is how Tik Tok came to be.

Stephen: Tik Tok had basically originally started as musically became Tik Tok. They had they were take they were taking no heat. Um, so they they created an algorithm which is the equivalent of like crack cocaine. The reason why I have a Tik Tok account. I don't have the app on my phone. I have never had the app on my phone. I don't I don't was because I I noticed that the view variance on Tik Tok was like no other platform. What I mean by that is you can have a million followers on Tik Tok and you can get 10,000 views or you can get 10 million views. In the 15 years that I've been on social media, building social media businesses, I'd never seen this before. And what it indicated to me is that the algorithm was being an even more aggressive sorting hat or retention machine.

Jonathan: What to push up, what to push down.

Stephen: Yeah.

Stephen: And so, like, when I started in social media in 2014, if I had a million followers, I might get a million views or maybe 800,000. I did some research the other day on all of our social channels over time and what we're seeing is the variance in the amount of views we can get is increasing which means the algorithm is doing more work to say show everyone this. I don't care if the person that posted it is called Jenny and has seven followers and show no one this. I don't care if it's Steven who has a million followers or whatever. And I realized that Tik Tok was was way ahead of everybody here. And that's why they are the most addictive, the fastest growing platform. I say all this to say that even if meta shut down tomorrow, someone else would seize the opportunity if there isn't sort of policy, I I guess

Stephen: in place.

Jonathan: That's right.

Stephen: Would you be whack-a-ole, right?

Jonathan: Yeah. No, that's right. And so, you know, in terms of who's done the damage to kids, Meta is the big fish via Instagram. And they're also the main player in terms of spending a huge amount of money to lobby Congress and ch and block laws. They're also the main player in buying up civil society organizations, giving money to organizations, the national PTA, all sorts of organizations. They get to then give a message on digital citizenship or digital health. So, Meta really is the major driver. Meta is the tobacco industry here trying to change the the dialogue. But in terms of the products, um, Snapchat is probably more deadly in terms of the actual number of deaths per user because Snapchat is not it's not making you depressed by social comparison as much. Snapchat is introducing you to all kinds of people and it's the main way that drug dealers and and extortionists find kids. Snapchat has a quick ad feature which relentlessly pushes you to connect with friends of friends. So once a man can get any f any kid in a school, now he can get connected to all the kids in the school. So, uh, when we in a lot of the court cases, you know, when you have you have suicides from cyber bullying, you have drug overdoses from, you know, a kid bought a Xanax, but it had fentinel in it. So, Snapchat at Snapchat in TW in in 2022, we know from their internal documents, from the lawsuits, they were getting 10,000 reports of sextortion from their users, not a year, every month. And that's just what was reported, which is the tip of the iceberg. So, Snapchat is a terrible platform for children to be on. It should be an adult-only platform. You're talking with strangers around the world and and on with disappearing messages and Snapchat doesn't even keep a record. It is ideal for sextortion. There's even a handbook how to stor kids on Snapchat. It goes around the world and and criminal organizations use it. So, uh so I definitely don't want to let Snapchat off. Tik Tok of course is a Chinese company. Uh I mean nominally we'll see if it if that's changed but it was a Chinese company that gave its Chinese kids got healthy Tik Tok or doyen and they got they got they they you know learned to follow astronauts and they gave us the their their algorithm feeds their kid patriotic stuff. Um it shuts off at a certain time at night. There's all kinds of limits. So the people make the technology generally want to protect their own kids and they want other kids to use it. That's what Tik Tok is doing in China. They want American kids to rot in hell, but they want their kids to grow up with the ability to focus. And it's the same thing with the tech guys in in in Silicon Valley. They don't let their kids use this stuff. They make their nannies sign contracts that they will not let the kid have a phone. They will not expose the kid to that. They send their kids to schools like the Waldorf school that precisely because there are no computers or tech in the classroom. So once again, we see their reveal behavior. They know they designed it to be addictive. They know it's addictive. They don't let their kids use it. they want your kids to use it. Um, so I think that's where we are.

Stephen: And how does AI become a protagonist in the story?

Adi: So my my work is now focused on AI chatbots, mental health, and the human connection. We haven't yet kind of delved into loneliness, but there's this unmet need for human connection, right? Deep human connection. We don't have a sense of meaning or purpose right now because what happens is uh we can talk a little bit more about the default mode network and what happens to your brain when you don't allow yourself to get bored because you're constantly on your devices and that meaning and purpose that self-reerential thinking is really what develops when you're bored. And so all of this that we're talking about that feeling of disenchantment. It's a fragmented society. You're by yourself. It's that echo chamber phenomenon. All of it leads to it kind of opens the door for AI chatbots. And so what the reason is because these tech companies are sensing that people aren't really happy on social media and they're thinking about getting off, right? They're they're using it less. They're because social media has become less social, more media. So they're not really engaging as much and they're spending time doing other things. And so The Atlantic had a fantastic piece about this. They're building it as the antisocial media. So tech companies are building AI chatbots and calling it it's the antisocial media. It's a place where you can go to form deeper connections and you know really have someone understand you. One of the tech leaders said that there's an unmet human need for connection and people don't have as many friends as they want to and so we're going to introduce um friendship through AI chatbots. There is a Reddit forum right now. So just to back up AI chatbots, what we're talking about in our conversation today is the publicly available chat bots, not you know AI for medical care which has um you know breast cancer so many wonderful in in my field and like medicine breast cancer diagnoses and detection 5 years earlier through AI. I mean there's some amazing things coming out of AI. This is about the publicly available conversational chatbot phenomenon. And so when Harvard Business Review found that the number one use case is not productivity is not, you know, coding or things that you think of when you're using an AI chatbot, but it's mental health therapy and companionship. Number one use case of AI chatbots. So people are using AI chatbots as a life adviser, as a therapist, as as a companion in on Reddit, which is like the zeitgeist. It's sort of like, you know, where

Stephen: And why is this a bad thing?

Adi: Oh, I mean so many reasons why

Stephen: use it as for companionship, for example.

Adi: There's so many red flags about AI chat bots. And so Reddit has a forum. It's uh I think last I checked 45,000 people. AI is my boyfriend. And you know, people who are having a relationship with their AI chatbot. The reason it's bad, I mean AI chat bots are, you know, where social media is about attention, the attention economy, dopamine. What's happening with the AI chatbot phenomenon? It's that it is forming attachments. So oxytocin is a hormone, the bonding hormone, and we're probably going to see more data on how oxytocin is involved. And so it is going to reshape human connection.

Jonathan: Right? If I could add on to that, that was that was beautifully put. Social media came and hacked our attention and took most of it with devastating effects. Now AI is coming to hack our attachments which is going to have even more devastating effects. So think about it this way. Everyone needs to understand the attachment system. It's this wonderful system that all mammals have that keeps the mother and other species but for humans mothers and fathers keeps us connected to the child and the child to the parent. But it's it's this cybernetic system in which as the kid is is as the kid is beginning to develop and is able to like you know you do like peekaboo games and you do the back and forth and it's just the most delightful thing. You get that back and forth. Um it's called serve and return interactions and all the time the child is developing what's called an internal working model of the parent and the model in their head is oh you know when I get in trouble that that this is the person that comes and soothes me. And the point of this isn't just to make the child feel good. The point is that now the child can go off and play because that's where the learning happens. It doesn't happen when you're in your mother's arms. The the whole point of the attachment system is to regulate the child going off and playing, taking risks, having experiences, and then when something goes wrong, as it always does, then they come running back to their secure base. And if they don't have a secure base, then they're much more anxious and they don't explore as much and they don't develop as much. All right? So, this develops very gradually over the all of childhood. And the internal working models you develop as a child are the models that you will reuse in puberty for romantic relationships. And so if you are securely attached as a child, you're more likely to be securely attached as an adult on the dating market, which makes you a much better candidate for boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife. Um, what's going to happen? AI is going to intervene very early. AI is going to be so much more responsive than the parent because the parent has a job and the kitchen and two other kids and is not always there. But the AI teddy bear is always there for you. So the primary working models are going to be for the teddy bear, the AI chatbot in the teddy bear and later the AI chatbot on your iPad and then on your computer and already there are holographic porn naked, you know, beautiful men and women that can be your companion. So, we're going to have a whole generation growing up developing attachments to AI generated holograms from companies that are now about to enter the inshidification process in a way beyond anything we've ever seen. Just if I could just briefly say what init have you heard the word in shitification? Okay. So it's a uh there's a wonderful book uh out now by Corey Doctoro who addressed the question why is it that everything all the platforms they they seem so wonderful at first the whole internet with everything so wonderful and then it all turns to How does that happen? And he says it's a very simple process. They discovered early on certainly in the early social media age by the early 2000s they discovered you know what you got to get to scale. Scale beats everything else. You got to get millions of people. You don't need a business model. Just get the millions. get the millions and then we'll figure out how to monetize it. How do you get the millions? You have to be super nice, attractive, fun, everyone's here. It's just girls dancing. What could possibly go wrong with girls dancing for men all over the world? Nothing. Um, so it all seems very nice at first. And then once they have scale, now they they of course they've raised multiple rounds of of venture capital. They have to start monetizing. They have to start repaying. So now they start squeezing the customers to pay the users because the users are not the customers. the advertisers are the real customers. Um, so now they've got to extract money from the users to give to the advertisers. But then once they've got all the advertisers and they've shut down local papers and all the other competition, now they start start squeezing the advertisers too and trimming the degree to which the they they keep more of the surplus for themselves. So, inshitification can explain why all these platforms become predatory, why they always put profit ahead of kids uh well-being or safety. And for the social media companies, we're talking about, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that that they raised. For the AI companies, it's billions and billions. They are going to have to monetize beyond anything we've ever imagined. Now, they're already introducing advertising. Okay? So, we've got these chat bots that are our children's best friends and lovers and therapists and and everything else. And these things have to monetize. They have to extract billions somehow. So, I don't even know how they're going to do it. But for some reason, I don't trust them. I think that we're about to see uh an inshitification of AI chat bots far beyond anything that we saw in social media. OpenAI have just announced recently, OpenAI, the owners of Chat GBT, that they will be putting adverts in, I believe, the premium model for billions of users around the world.

Stephen: That's how it starts

Stephen: potentially.

Adi: Yeah. There was a big Super Bowl campaign, you know, um and one that was particularly interesting was the um Claude, its competitor. Betrayal was the title of that ad. And it was a young guy talking to his older female therapist about how he has some mommy issues and talking about, you know, what should I do? And so that therapist is Chachi PT and you know that pause right before answering the question. It's very comical. And so it's, you know, she answers. It's like the anthropomorphization of and we can talk about what that word means. Um, you know, comes to life. It's like Chachi PD comes to life and answers and saying you know you can try this with your mother and this for a you know difficult relationship etc. And then just says um and if you want there is this new dating site for young men and older cougars.

Stephen: Yeah

Adi: it was so problematic and it was called betrayal and the guy says what

Stephen: it's obviously you know Sam Wman came out and did a big tweet about saying that's not how ads are going to work etc. But to some degree, if I've developed a relationship with my AI and I use it for therapy and dealing all my problems in life,

Stephen: to some degree, kind of.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Jonathan: Yeah. No. And look, and besides, look, Sam can say that all he wants. And maybe it's I don't doubt that it's true for now. But once once one company crosses the threshold and puts advertising into this incredibly intimate relationship, the most intimate relationship in most young people's lives is going to be with their AIs. Once they cross the boundary and say, "Oh, but we've got ethical advertising." That'll last five or 10 minutes and even if they don't change, others are now going every other company's going to do it and they won't be bound by the same thing and eventually collective action problem. Open AI will have to do it too. Again, a massive title wave of shitification is heading our way at warp speed.

Stephen: I um I don't have my phone out because I'm I've lost attention. I wanted to uh show ask you guys what you thought of um of this. So, on one of the AI apps,

Stephen: they now have a companions button, and I can pick who I want to talk to. And there's one particularly seducing lady here, Annie, who

视频片段: Hey, you're back. Missed that dirty mouth of yours. What took you so long?

Stephen: We did it on the podcast before.

Stephen: What could possibly go wrong with this?

视频片段: Yeah. want to pick right back up where we left off or start something even

Stephen: No, I would like to pick right back up where we left off, Annie, last time on the show. Um, what what what's going on with you today?

视频片段: I'm still sore from last time, baby.

Stephen: God.

Stephen: But but I mean, this is a this is an app that I can download on my phone.

Jonathan: Any child can download it.

Stephen: A child can download it on their phone. It does ask me, again, I'm not justifying this at all. It asked me what my birth year was. It didn't make me prove it.

Jonathan: Let me guess. But it also us it suggests that you were born 18 years ago. That's the default usually.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It just asked me what my birthday. It didn't ask me to prove it or anything like that. And we all know that relationships and connection is retentive. And I've heard all these CEOs of these companies talking about companionship apps and and AI that can be your friend. I've heard all of the major social apps talking about this. It is deeply concerning especially in the context of a loneliness crisis.

Jonathan: It is a tsunami.

Jonathan: It is approaching fast and furious and it is not a toy. It is going to fundamentally rewire everything.

Stephen: Human relationships,

Jonathan: everything.

Stephen: That's right.

Adi: It is so detrimental.

Jonathan: Yeah. Can I just say something about the these tech executives and companies offering this as a way to address the loneliness crisis? So, there's a Yiddish word called and kutzbah means like nerve. Like you've got a lot of nerve.

Stephen: The audacity.

Jonathan: The audacity. Yeah. And the the classic, you know, the classic comedic definition of hutzbah is a boy who murders his parents and then he asks the judge for clemency because he's an orphan. Okay, so that's hutzbah. Now imagine that you're Mark Zuckerberg. You quoted him before. Mark Zuckerberg was the executive who said, "Well, you know, I read that, you know, people on average want 15 friends, but they only have three."

Jonathan: these companions to fill that void that we have the way we think about them. We thought about about them as gods and saviors early in the internet phase and the things they created were magical but we have to change our thinking about them and see the just the massive destruction that they have already wrought on our children, our society, our democracy and it's just the beginning. AI is going to make this so much more intense. when you hear these tech leaders, you know, I love hearing Jonathan talk because he just goes there and I'm always way more tempered. Um, and I love it. It's emboldening me to

Jonathan: Yeah, I'm getting angry. I I don't really get angry, but in the last year, I'm getting angry.

Adi: I love I love it. So, the way when you hear all of these various tech leaders speak, they will always say they they speak to the issue. So, you know, I've heard many of for research for my second book, Blackbrain, I've heard I've been listening to a lot of Sam Alman's speeches or panels and he will always say things like, "Yeah, you know, privacy is a major issue or yeah, people, you know, 1 million users a week talk about suicide on Chad GPT. Yeah, this is an issue." And so they address it or they they speak it. And so you think, okay, there's going to be some sort of solution. And often the solution is yeah, you know, society, we're gonna have to figure this out,

Stephen: right?

Jonathan: So the burden of responsibility is not on the developer. It's, you know,

Jonathan: the harmful externalities get foisted on the rest of us. Too bad you guys figure it out.

Stephen: You said in the last year you're getting angry.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Stephen: Why in the last year?

Jonathan: Um because I was so deeply immersed in the book and the writing and the of the book and trying to understand the numbers and the graphs and the trends and the studies and that's all very abstract. But then since the book came out, I have had so many conversations and I've met so many of the survivor parents. Like just for example, I so I was in London. This is just so unbelievable. I was just in in London two or three weeks ago and I met uh Ellen I believe Ellen Groom I think was her name. Uh her son Jules was found dead. Happy kid found dead, strangled. Uh it sure looked like it was the choking challenge. 13-year-old boy. It everything looked like the choking challenge on Tik Tok.

Stephen: What's the choking challenge?

Jonathan: Um, it's a challenge where kids are challenged to cut off the circulation to the point where they pass out, but then they I think they're supposed to try to film themselves waking up after they've passed out. And of course, if you don't do it exactly right, you die. And so, we don't know how many have died. Hundreds for sure. We don't really know. Um, because, you know, you find a kid dead, you don't know what it is. If you don't have the code, if you don't have the the password to get into your kid's phone, you can't get in. And so, so she was, I think she was able to get into the phone, but she couldn't get into his TikTok. and she went to uh Delaware to they went she went to sue to demand that Tik Tok release what was he watching when he died

Jonathan: and Tik Tok says oh privacy issue oh no we won't release that as if they care about privacy and then in the courtroom this was so disgusting in the courtroom uh trying in Delaware this British woman coming over trying to get some justice trying to at least get some information the lawyer for Tik Tok is trying to suggest that your son was was was depressed beforehand and he he was he was going to be suicidal basically. Oh, you know, even if he was watching Tik Tok, that was just a correlation. Tik Tok didn't cause it. He was going to die anyway. I mean, it's just so disgusting the way these companies treat the parents and the kids that they're crushing and stepping on. And so, the more I see this, the more I realize this is I mean, this is a level of cruelty that goes far beyond the tobacco industry. The tobacco executives, they had to go home at night, but they never saw during their workday, they never saw children suffering. They saw people dying, middle age and older, but they never saw children suffering. The social media executives, they have to go home knowing every day that millions and millions of kids have been cyberbullied, sexed, shown uh eating disorder videos. Uh uh many have committed suicide. They have to go home knowing that, knowing that they designed it for addiction, knowing the kids are addicted, and lying about it. So yeah, I'm getting angry.

Stephen: And in their own homes,

Stephen: right? And in their own homes, the hypocrites don't let their kids do it.

Jonathan: That's right. So yeah, I'm getting angry.

Stephen: You talked earlier about deleting these apps from our phone. I probably should have represented the rebuttal, which will be, well, I I need this for my business. Increasingly, people need Tik Tok to run their businesses,

Stephen: and I imagine there'll be a lot of people who will be listening right now. I I guess I'm in a slightly different position because I've I have the I have options,

Stephen: but for some people that are running small businesses,

Stephen: what do you say to those people?

Jonathan: Yeah. So, this is part of the reason that I focus on the kids because for the kids, it's totally clear what we need to do. raise the age. They should not be on it. These are adult only platforms. For adults, a I'm I'm very hesitant to tell adults what they should do or what they have to do or pass laws blocking people. I'm hesitant to do that. And I totally see that for businesses. It is useful. I use X and Instagram and LinkedIn to get my work out. These are very powerful tools for adults. The only real solution to the adult for the adult problem is going to come from market competition. is going to come from. Imagine if there was a social media app that was built from the beginning for trust because what are the places that didn't get in shitified? eBay, Uber, places where you're dealing with strangers. You don't know the name of your driver. He doesn't know yours. You you know first name, that's all. But the company knows the company has know your customer rules, know your driver rules. So you can have social media apps that are built for trust so that if someone, you know, if a driver tries to six or sexually harass a customer, that driver gets fired.

Adi: Well, just this week though, there was that big lawsuit, right, with that woman and um her Uber driver raped her.

Jonathan: Okay. And did they Okay.

Adi: And now it's like slowly coming out that Uber um you know has patterns of

Adi: uh covering up certain.

Jonathan: So So hopefully that will change. You know, hopefully this was a landmark lawsuit and now

Jonathan: we all we all let our daughters get into Ubers with strange men from around the world, you know, that we don't know everywhere.

Jonathan: Yeah. So, it means in general the system works. Of course, yes, there are there are places where they're not careful. Um, and so what I'm dreaming of is that someone will come up with a platform that has know your customer rules. There are no bots. There are no, you know, foreign intelligence agencies agencies manipulating us. and you can trust what's on there. You know that it's real. Uh and that there will be an alternative. I don't I'm not sure what the monetary model would be at the beginning. Um subscription generally seems to be the least corrupted whereas selling advertisements as OpenAI is now doing is the most corrupting. Um it's going to force them to maximize for engagement. So I I understand we can't just you know businesses can't just boycott these. There has to be something. But I think there there there will be better ones coming out. I think right now as a stop gap while these social media companies their feet are held to the fire, there are things that we can do in the now. So, you know, the things that I talk about all day is like how to create boundaries and so that you can protect your mental health, stay informed, run your business, but then be able to not have all of those delletterious effects to your brain and your body.

Stephen: It is quite it's quite difficult. Um I I kind of see both of your perspectives on this. It's quite different.

Jonathan: I'm only talking about adults. So for kids, you know, as a mother Yeah. I have

Stephen: even for adults, I find it

Adi: we have a zero screen policy in our home.

Stephen: It's kind of like trying to navigate through the world and avoid processed foods, you know, and this is probably even more compelling because it's in my pocket all the time. I need it for other things and it's just one one reach away. So, you know, boundaries, I think I could build a discipline to to create boundaries, but I've sat here on this podcast for many, many years listening to neuroscientists tell me, "Steve, don't don't put your phone in your bedroom."

Jonathan: That's right.

Stephen: And I'm still waking up and it's the first thing I look at with one eye open and then I'm going to bed and I'm doing the whole revenge thing that you just said at night time. I'm so glad you've given cuz I will finish a hard day of work of work. It might be 11:00 and then my partner is waiting for me.

Stephen: Yes. you know, we're going to have some time, but I want some me time. So, there I am. I'm on short form video scrolling till like 2 a.m. in the morning. Like, what the hell? And then I'm I I wake up late the next day. My diet's worse because of my sleep was. It's all worse. My relationship's worse. I didn't spend time with her. And I'm going, what the hell just happened? I'd got nothing out of that scrolling session.

Adi: It's like that revenge bedtime progressing teenage.

Jonathan: And it would be so much better off if you would watch Netflix or a movie that that you you most of those problems would go away if you would make that me time. be watching something long and with some quality of the production

Adi: or let's take it a step further and not do anything and just sit there sit there on your couch. You know, we talked about boredom very briefly, but you know, we

Jonathan: torture for this generation.

Adi: It's torture, but it's also, you know, we don't we still have a capacity for boredom, meaning we as like the human brain does, but we just don't allow ourselves to get bored. And so when you're thinking about, you know, that art, the lost art of pondering

Adi: and just sitting there, you know, I think I don't know if it was Stephen, you or Jonathan said, you know, when you're in the car, I remember as a little kid we did road trip. Yeah. Road trips with my family and all you're doing just make up games. Look out of the window. We have lost Yeah. We've lost that. And so there's this thing called the default mode um network which I think is important to think about right now as we're thinking about AI and what's going to happen and how it's going to hijack our sense of attachment and attention. So the sense of meaning and purpose, right? If you ask people right now, most people will say I um a keynote speaker so I speak all over and when I ask people the word that comes up over and over is a sense of horizonlessness.

Stephen: Adults,

Stephen: oh interesting. People feel like they have nothing to look forward to right now. The human brain needs something to look forward to. That's how we're wired progress and you know in in all ways. And so right now there's this sense and it's not just now. It's been for the past several years after the pandemic specifically and during the pandemic is when it really changed how we started thinking about the future. And so we have this sense of like what's the point? What's the point of working hard now? What's the point of doing whatever? because it's like I don't really see a future for myself.

Adi: And so I think that along with this fragmented attention, our loneliness, boredom might be the antidote. It's a way to reset your brain. And the reason is because we are living through this poly crisis, right? It's the era of the poly crisis. And poly crisis simply means that there's something happening everywhere at all times. And we with our devices, this high techch device that plugs us in everywhere, our brains are getting fed real time on the ground information. And so while all of this has evolved, technology now with AI chatbots, your amygdala has not. And so it feels like when something is happening, whether it's far away or close by, your amydala has that same reaction. Now, if you were to not engage in revenge by time for procrastination, put your phone away and just kind of hang out. Maybe drink a cup of herbal tea like old school, uh, play a board game or something. You might, you know, or just allow yourself to get bored. That hyperactivation, hypervigilance, you might be able to come back down to baseline, that default mode network will start working in the background. You might develop a greater sense of meaning and purpose

Stephen: probably today. And then life is going to happen to me again. And boom, I'm back into it. And you know,

Adi: you could create a practice, a cultivate a practice. you're interviewing neuroscientists and I go if I still can't crack it and I have all the information and advice and hacks and tips and tricks and resources and I could you know I can decide what time I wake up like I've got all these this like privilege and I can't crack it I go you know it's going to be really difficult.

Jonathan: So let me let me offer a way of thinking about this. So, in my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, um there's there's a metaphor in there. It's it's about 10 ancient ideas, and I use a lot of metaphors to explain ancient ideas about psychology and whe whether they're true. And um the first chapter is on how the mind is divided into parts that often conflict like a small rider, which is our conscious reasoning on a very large elephant, which is all the automatic processes that happen that we don't see what's happening. We just see we just feel the results, intuition and emotion. And psychotherapists tell me this is incredibly helpful metaphor with their with their patients because it explains and there's a quote from oid in there. I see the right way and approve it. Alas, I follow the wrong. So I know I should go to bed as you say, but yet for some reason I'm not going to bed because our brains are 500 million years old. They work on automatic processes. They're animal brains. And then very recently we got language and we can reason things out, but the but the parts that do reasoning don't control behavior. And so really the elephant is what largely guides our behavior, our automatic processes. And your phone um as I said before, BF Skinner is in your phone. Your phone is a behaviorist training device that trains the elephant. Um and that's why you often do things with your phone that you don't want to do. And so, and this is why I'm so insistent that we all have to get all of the slot machine apps off of our phone. That is the original iPhone was an amazing tool. It was a Swiss Army knife. It had, you know, a telephone, a browser, maps, a music player, there was a flashlight. Okay, there was no app store. There were no push notifications. 2007, 2008, it's just a Swiss Army knife. There's no problem. Okay, now I'm very lucky in that my iPhone has always stayed that. I'm always on a computer. So, my problem, my attention problems are on my computer, but my phone because I never had any addictive apps on it except during the crypto craze where I played around with it and I got hooked and I was checking 50 times a day and I saw the addiction. So, I once I got rid of that and lost all the money that I was willing to lose. Once I get rid of that, my phone has no addictive power over me because when I see it, there's no it's not a slot machine call, hey, come back and play, come back and play.

Stephen: So your phone right now on your personal device, you don't have any social media apps or anything like that.

Jonathan: I do have Twitter, but I never check it there. I never use use that on the phone, you know. Now texting and email is a little bit like a slot machine because sometimes you but it's very mild. So this is again what I this is what works for my students. Just get the slot machine apps off your phone and then you'll find that then you could even have your phone near you when you go to bed. But if you've got addictive apps on your phone, you can't have it when you go to bed. Angela Duckworth, the woman who who gave us the concept of grit, she has this amazing graduation speech at one of the schools in New England, and she says something like,

Jonathan: "Where you put your phone at night will may become the most important decision you make in your life."

Jonathan: And what she means by that is not that s it's it's I if you can use behavioral control and change the stimula, if you can do that, then you're going to be okay. But if not, the phone is going to take your attention. and you're not going to amount to anything.

Stephen: All I had to do was brain dump. Imagine if you had someone with you at all times that could take the ideas you have in your head, synthesize them with AI to make them sound better and more grammatically correct and write them down for you. This is exactly what Whisper Flow is in my life. It is this thought partner that helps me explain what I want to say. And it now means that on the go, when I'm alone in my office, when I'm out and about, I can respond to emails and Slack messages and WhatsApps and everything across all of my devices just by speaking. I love this tool. And I started talking about this on my behindthescenes channel a couple of months back. And then the founder reached out to me and said, "We're seeing a lot of people come to our tour because of you." So, we'd love to be a sponsor. We'd love you to be an investor in the company. And so, I signed up for both of those offers. And I'm now an investor and a huge partner in a company called Whisper Flow. You have to check it out. Whisper Flow is four times faster than typing. So if you want to give it a try, head over to whisperflow.ai/doac to get started for free. And you can find that link to whisperflow in the description below.

Stephen: We asked our audience how many of them thought they were addicted to their phone. And roughly 85% of respondents, the driver audience described themselves as being very or completely addicted to

Jonathan: very or completely. That surprises I didn't realize it would be that high. So you can do a test. So for people listening if you want to say like how addicted and by the way we're using the word addiction very loosely in our conversation. And so what we're really talking about because you know there is in terms of you know medical clinical syndrome um when you think about addiction there's certain criteria and so what we're talking about is overuse or over reliance on your devices.

Stephen: Compulsive overuse that interferes with other domains of life.

Adi: Yes. It inter

Stephen: if that is an addiction I don't know what is. And so when you're thinking about am I addicted to my phone? Do I have am I you know really what the very simple thing that you can do. I did it myself and I was like I know again like you Stephen like know all the science still was really difficult. You have all the access and it was still difficult. And so all you have to do is you just take your phone you put it in another part of your house or apartment or whatever and give yourself a couple of hours when you know you're going to be home or you know you're not reliant on your phone for work or whatever. an hour, two hours, three hours, and just have a piece of paper, old school, piece of paper and a pen with you. And every time you feel that compulsion of like, I want to check my device, you make a mark, you make a mark, you make a mark, and just to see because some people say, I'm surprised that your audience at 85% because most people would say, I don't know if I'm really addicted. And so I like that there's that sense of self-awareness. But if you're thinking, I'm not really that addicted. You breathe in an hour 960 times a minute. And you may notice that you want to have that that compulsion to check 960 times a minute or you know thereabouts because we all have that sense of reliance on our devices. So that's like a really quick way that you can check to see am I relying on my device?

Stephen: Are you addicted to your phone under that definition?

Adi: Because of the line of work that I am in, I can very quickly I have certain tells when I know I call them the canary in the coal mine, right? I think we talked about this the last time I was here. I can very quickly tell when I'm starting to get that feeling of addiction or compulsion. And so I course correct early, but that's only because I know the science and I course correct. So I keep my you I keep my phone outside I I walk the talk. I keep my phone outside my bedroom. It is not within arms reach. I grayscale my phone during periods of deep focus during the day when I have a deadline I have to get things done and at night so I avoid revenge bedtime procrastination but sometimes it happens like I'm a human you know so this past week um not to be a real downer but there have been things that have been in the media the past week that have been really challenging especially as a woman and so I have found myself with the primal urge to scroll my amydala has been triggered I have been going down rabbit holes and I wouldn't ordinarily do that so I give myself grace too and have a sense of self-compassion.

Stephen: Do you feel like you're addicted to your phone?

Jonathan: No, I'm not at all addicted to my phone. Uh cuz I don't have any slot machine apps on it. But I really want to question you made a distinction that many scientists do, which is well, you know, we can't quite say it's addiction because, you know, addiction is certain biochemical pathways based on, you know, heroin and addictive substances. Uh but I believe that this is one of the meta talking points that they that they are able to push that we can't call it addiction. It's different. No, I don't mean No, I'm sorry. I don't mean I'm sorry. And no way. Look, you know, you and I are total allies on this. We see the problem. We're both all I mean is, you know, we're we're supposed to be very careful about using the word addiction, but and you had analyt and she was very clear like in her practices and now it's overwhelmingly digital addictions. It's all of this is working through dopamine. If you feel compulsive use, definitely dopamine. So, it's most of the same brain centers as it is for heroin or crack or any other drug. Um, and it's the same effects that is the it's it's compulsive use where you don't want to do it, you want to change, but yet you find yourself doing it and you have withdrawal effects. Uh, and people and people have terrible withdrawal effects when they're heavy users of these things and they stop. And so, you know, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and swims like a duck, I'm going to call it a duck. In fact, that's what they call it. So, I just want to read one more quote. Again, the quotes are just so astonishing. some meta uh meta researchers and one of them says quote it seems clear from what's presented here in this internal study uh that some of our users are addicted to our products that's their word addicted to our products and I worry that driving sessions incentivizes us to make our products more addictive without providing much more value how to keep someone returning over and over to the same behavior each day intermittent rewards are most effective think slot machines reinforcing behaviors that become especially hard to extinguish even when they provide little reward or cease providing reward at all. people. I mean, it just imagine an industry that has caused 85% of people to feel that they're addicted

Stephen: and not calling it addiction

Jonathan: and not calling it addiction. And these people these these people are having their lives diminished, their relationships diminished. So I'm trying to convey is we're seeing the destruction of human capital, the destruction of human potential, the destruction of human relationships, the destruction of connection, the destruction of sense of meaning at a scale so vast I don't think people are capable of comprehending it. I now believe this is affecting most human beings. These industries, these few companies have damaged the lives of most human beings. We don't have good data from the developing world but certainly the developed world wherever kids are going through puberty on on touchscreens. You you you you have this constant fighting over the over the uh over the screens over the technology and you have these uh diminishing outcomes, diminishing cognition, diminishing sense of of purpose in life

Stephen: only to get worse with the AI.

Jonathan: As AI comes in, it's going to get worse unless we act and we've got to change course in 2026. We don't have five years to study it. We've got to stop this now in 2026.

Stephen: Are you concerned at all about the way education's going for children? Because

Jonathan: Oh my god. Yes.

Stephen: It appears that edte edtech is, you know, big tech in a sweater, as they say.

Stephen: Because I I was almost imagining a future where my future kids are going to learn their curriculum from an AI chatbot. Cuz, you know, I can imagine the case cheaper,

Stephen: more personalized, more convenient. It's going to know my if my son's called Timmy, it's going to know Timmy's brain and it's going to know how to make him pay attention and what he's interested in and what he's not. So, are you concerned about this or is this a good thing?

Jonathan: There is definitely a use case for edtech. Um, if there could be a device that only did math tutoring or only did tutoring and you couldn't watch videos on it, I'm totally open to believing that that can speed up teaching. But here's what's happened.

Jonathan: We put computers on everyone's desks around 2014, 2015. We used to think in America that it was an equity issue even back to the 90s. The rich kids all have computers. The poor kids don't. Let's get philanthropists to buy computers for school districts that every kid can have a computer on their desk. Okay. Now, what is a computer? It's a play device. It does everything. Kids use it at home. They, you know, they watch videos. They do all sorts of things. You put it on their desk and you tell them to do math homework. What happens? It's mostly short videos. That's what research is showing. It ends up because they don't, you know, they always they don't block YouTube. They might say, "Oh, we block porn. We block video games." They can get around all that. And if you're letting them do YouTube, it's YouTube shorts, which is Tik Tok. So, what happened to test scores in the United States from the 70s through 2012? They were rising. We actually were improving what kids knew, what kids learned in the United States. We have very good data. The national the NAPE, the National Assessment of Educational Progress goes up till 2012. And then by 2015, it starts going down. And it's going down before COVID and it goes down more during COVID and everyone thinks like oh it's COVID but it started go the peak was 2012 and what's happening what we now can see is that the top students the very best students who are the ones with executive function they're the ones who can pay attention if you put a computer on that kid's desk he's not destroyed by it he can actually still learn but the bottom 50% cannot the b so all of the drop in educational stats is the bottom 50% the bottom 50% % in terms of capacity to pay attention. Their education is being devastated and that's what happened when we put laptops and we put Chromebooks and iPads on their desks. Um, we spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this stuff and it has damaged education and if we'd spent a quarter of that on teachers, we would be in such better shape today. So, we made a colossal blunder with edtech in the 2010s and now we're about to do the same thing again with AI. Again, maybe there are apps, maybe there are applications that will be great, but we've got to put the burden of proof on Silicon Valley. We've got to say, you guys have to prove that this stuff is effective and safe before we'll let it in. We are not going to let you just say, "Hey, let's just flood the zone. Let's give it to everybody and then we'll wait 10 years and see what happens."

Stephen: I mean that brings brings up this um this study that I have in front of me here which was a 2022 study a Munich study which tested the idea of brain rot which um I believe was the Oxford dictionary word of the year 2024

Stephen: and what they did is they gave 60 participants a test then a 10-minute break and then another test during the break they either rested or used Tik Tok Twitter or YouTube and the results showed the following the Tik Tok group so They had a 10-minute interval to do anything. And this group got Tik Tok to look at. Their memory accuracy dropped from 80% before the break to 49% after the break. A nearly 40% decline just from a 10-minute break. In contrast, the Twitter and YouTube groups showed no significant change in the Munich study. And there's an image I'll throw up on the screen.

Stephen: Results from the Munich study showed a 40% drop in prospective memory accuracy in the Tik Tok group after a 10minute break, which is unbelievable. Yeah, it's unbelievable. What the hell is going on there? How can a 10-minute Tik Tok break drop my memory accuracy by 40%.

Jonathan: Tik Tok is brain rot.

Stephen: What's going on?

Adi: There's so much going on in the brain. So, you know, when you're thinking about here's the thing. Brain breaks are not nice to haves. They're actually essential for your brain. And so we talked a little bit about that, you know, default mode network and what happens to it when you're engaging with your devices. And you know, that's not a brain break. That's activating all of the aspects. So it's activating your amygdala. It's dampening or decreasing the volume of your prefrontal cortex. It's creating that reward system, the dopamine hit, those addictive behaviors. So it's only, you know, when you're thinking about memory planning, what was the metric here? It was memory, right? that was the the the metric that they were using to study. And so when you're thinking about working memory or um cognitive function, complex problem solving, this is all prefrontal cortex. And so when you're engaging with Tik Tok 10 minutes, 5 minutes, whatever it is, you are dialing down that biology in your brain. And so of course you're going to see changes and you're going to see the flip side, increased hypervigilance, irritability, distractability, fragmented attention. It's just again this is not to say that this whole conversation right or when you're reading studies you might say to yourself what's wrong with me you know is there something wrong with me am is my brain broken am I weak it is not you you are not alone it is not your fault it is the biology of your brain doing exactly as it should so we talked about the amydala and prefrontal cortex here your amydala is not wrong or broken it's by design supposed to think about your immediate needs survival self-preservation And so when you're on the algorithm, we know we talked about, you know, certain um or maybe we didn't talk about it. Certain content that you see on Tik Tok and others that when it's reactionary, you know, words like FOMO or ragebait, these are not neutral terms. When you're engaging with these uh social media platforms, it's not something neutral. It's not passive. It is an active biological process in your brain. So this study, it's not surprising. It is actually exactly what you would expect on to happen to your biology if you had this sort of what we call in medicine this kind of intervention. It's stimulating exactly what it's supposed to do.

Jonathan: Yeah. I'll just I'll just add on to what Adidi said that there are some there are many medical conditions where you can't just go to the patient and say why do you think you got this cancer? Oh, you know I think it's cuz I ate a lot of you know chocolate when I was whatever. You know there when when the when the the the act is separated from the effect by 30 years then you don't expect the patients to have insight into the cause of it. But when the outcome is separated from the input by seconds and you have literally millions of chances to observe the co-variation

Jonathan: the patient is really really accurate. In fact the patient really knows what's going on. And so I think the deciding factor here on this big debate about oh is it just correlation or is it causation um the deciding factor for social media and for a lot of these tech innovations including video games and gambling and all of that should really be the kids and if the kids say this is bad for me we should take their word for it given that we also have correlational studies random control trials uh uh longitudinal studies natural I mean we have so much other data but given that the kids themselves they call it brain rot. They call the material brain rot. Um my students tell me it's a huge obstacle to them doing their homework. As one of them said, I pull out a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to Tik Tok. You know, so if they're telling us that this is damaging their ability to pay attention, they feel it. They feel the loss. We all feel it. Well, many of us have noticed this. Um um then I think this is pretty decisive evidence that this stuff is bad for cognition

Adi: and it has long-term consequences. So, it's not just that in the moment, right? So, there was this case that was all over the media, a college student. I'm sure you're familiar with the case. And this young woman was on TikTok experiencing brain rot. And then some Tik Tok algorithm took her down to this place of, you know, you should take an edible. It'll help you so you can Wow. prescribing drugs. Wow.

Stephen: And you could go to class and you could, you know, be more alert. And so, she did that. And then it continued on and on and then she developed a dependence on edibles and then checked into rehab. And only when she focused on analog activities like guitar playing and a couple of other things that she started doing is when and you know removing the stimulus the the Tik Tok um algorithm is when she started to improve. So it's not just in the moment oh I can't remember something or I'm more irritable. These sorts of things compound and the long-term squellle or the long-term effects can be quite damaging. That's just one example.

Stephen: In your book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan, you the the subtitle here is how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.

Stephen: I was looking at some of these graphs of different sort of mental illness illnesses and um they're increasing. One of them that's increasing is ADHD.

Stephen: I was diagnosed with ADHD. um maybe about a year ago. And when we're talking about short attention spans, I mean, the name attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, I believe that's what it's called,

Stephen: sounds a lot like what we're talking about.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Stephen: Is there a link, do you believe, between the increasing diagnosis of of ADHD and the sort of frying of our brains with short form video and social media?

Jonathan: Yeah, I I mean, I suspect that there is, but here's here's what I can tell you I learned while writing the book. Um, I looked to see if there were studies indicating that uh heavy use of of social media and video games and all the electronic stuff caused ADHD. And when I was doing the research in 2023, I did not find evidence that it will give a kid HD ADHD who otherwise wouldn't have it. What I did find was evidence that for kids who have ADHD, when you let them have the devices, the video games, all that, their symptoms get much worse. And so because it is a major achievement of young adulthood to be able to pay attention to develop what we've been calling executive function to be able to make a plan and decide oh to reach the plan I have to do this and then I do this and then it might be a long time before I get here but I will keep going and I will keep my eye on the prize that I I assume that's you're saying it's a little harder for you to do that. I mean that's what ADHD means.

Stephen: How do you experience ADHD? Well, well, hm, I def I mean, if I think about school, I couldn't pay attention in school for for for very long. And that meant that I was always in the expulsion room and then I was expelled. And then that's kind of it's I feel like it's got worse as an adult. And from my in my opinion, my relationship with my phone has made it much worse

Stephen: where really I can't I can't pay attention to to many things for a very long time. The exception to this is I can do deep work for many many hours without moving. It was almost a bit of

Jonathan: when you are extremely motivated. I say when you're really into it, you can be into it. That's right. But a lot of work isn't that a lot of being effective in the workplace is not you're following your passion. Right. ADHD kids, they can zoom in because they're getting the dopamine. They're getting the dopamine from this thing. But a lot of work isn't like that. And these kids are not going to be able to do that. So actually what you said, it fits perfectly with what what I found from those Dutch studies. if you did have whether it's a genetic or whatever the predisposition is the this environment has made your symptoms worse. Now of course ADHD kids can be incredibly uh creative they are often very very successful but my fear is that the pathways to success that they used to take might be blocked if they basically are just scrolling all day long and not able to pay not able to um have real life experiences

Adi: and relationships are like that especially romantic ones. It's an interesting thing that you bring up, Stephen, because there is an increase in adult onset, you know, when adults are diagnosed with ADHD, because typically we think of ADHD as a pediatric condition or young adults. And so, increasingly, we're seeing more and more adults who are in their 30s and 40s, 50s, sometimes even 60s, who are being diagnosed, newly diagnosed with ADHD. And so, that's an interesting there's so many um, you know, reasons like it might be that they had it all along and they were diagnosed. And so what is going on there? That would be a future podcast episode for an ADHD ADHD expert of, you know, what are the drivers of why are so many adults being diagnosed with ADHD

Stephen: or maybe even just the symptoms looking very similar.

Adi: Mhm.

Jonathan: Yeah, that's right.

Stephen: You talked about popcorn brain editing.

Adi: Yeah. So, you know, we've talked about brain rot and the primal scroll and popcorn brain is kind of an offshoot. It's part of the same family. And so what happens is it's a term coined by a man a psychologist named David Levy. And what happens with popcorn brain is that you and we all have it. And so what it is a societal phenomenon when you spend too much time online and you are overstimulated and so it is hard for you to spend time offline. Offline feels slow, boring because things are moving at a much slower pace. And so popcorn brain is the sensation of your brain popping. It is not actively popping. It's not like your brain cells are popping, but it sure feels like it. And so your primal urge to scroll kind of primes your brain to develop popcorn brain. You are more at risk for developing popcorn brain when you feel a sense of stress because of that primal urge to scroll. The differentiator between brain rot and popcorn brain. Again, these are societal terms that we're calling for a constellation or a group of symptoms, right? And so the difference to me is that popcorn brain is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. It's like we all have it and it's happening all all the time because of the modern age and a lot of the things that we talked about. Brain rod is a little bit more specific. It's a little bit more well-defined. So it has certain features like we call it the biocschychosocial model. When you're thinking about a particular medical or condition or an entity. So what are the biological factors? We talked about what defines brain rod. you know, a change in brain waves, a change in brain regions, the amygdala lighting up and the prefrontal cortex kind of being quiet. Um, psychological factors, we talked about attention, um, co complex problem solving, impulse control and then the social factors, loneliness and others. So, um, compulsion and so I would say popcorn brain is something that we all suffer from and you know brain rot is something that is very specific. The other thing that we haven't talked about that I would love to kind of because so much of our conversation is like doom and gloom, right? It's likew

Adi: one thing that I would like to say is that as bad as when you hear the term brain rot, it seems permanent because rot it conotes like deterioration. That's it. It's one-sided is one way and that's it. But in fact, popcorn brain and brain rot are reversible conditions. So it is not

Stephen: in adults

Jonathan: in adults. If you've gone through puberty with it, it's not so clear.

Adi: Yes. In adults, and my work focuses on adults. And so when you have, if you experience brain rot in your 30s, 40s, and beyond, you can, it takes time, you it takes eight weeks for your brain to rewire itself. Give yourself time. A sense of self-compassion is really important. But you can, you know, there is a sense of it being able to be reversed. So it's not so much a brain, it's not a fixed trait, but rather a brain state. So I think it's important to offer that hope.

Stephen: What is an adult brain? What age is an adult brain? Like what age does my brain stop growing in in the way where it's reversible?

Jonathan: So yeah, I mean that you know traditionally it was thought that uh you know puberty is the period of super rapid brain change and that begins you know early early teens sometimes even before 10 and is mostly over by sort of you know mid to late teens. But then the prefrontal cortex which Aditi was talking about which is so important for impulse control and and executive function that doesn't finish myelinating. Myelin is when the sort of the neuron that you get a sort of a fatty sheath like an insulation that sort of locks down the circuits and makes them more efficient. Um that doesn't stop until around age 25 is what we've always said for many years. But you're telling me that there's new research showing that.

Adi: Yeah.

Stephen: Tell tell us about that. So, you know, all this time, right, we've always said that the prefrontal cortex is fully formed and fully functional at the age of 25. And so, when you're talking about impulse control and all of this stuff, but there was this really interesting study, I'll send it to you. It um looked at I think it was 1,000 people um from age zero, so birth all the way to 90, so the entire population. And um it found five, it looked at lifespan and said there are actually five stages. So first is childhood up zero to age nine. During this time your brain is not very efficient but it's really growing and you know it's it's growing and changing but it's not really efficient.

Adi: 9 to 32 is considered adolescence and so you know 32 is when adolescence ends apparently according to the

Jonathan: sort of I mean you're most of the way done by 25 but but there's still some there's some flexibility even after that. And then the next stage is from 33 to I think 63.

Adi: 66 is like adulthood. Things are very stable. Learning is stable and you know um it's efficient and it's it it things are doing well and then yeah 66 to about 83 is early aging and so that's when you see some of the age related changes and then 83 plus is late aging. So the the kind of main finding was that, you know, it was all over the news. It was like adolescence goes until 32.

Stephen: So I'm 33. So I'm

Adi: one year, one year out.

Stephen: I'm cooked by now.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Stephen: When you wrote this book, Jonathan, the anxious generation, it um it's had a big impact on the world in a way that I think any author might dream of. And I know this in part because, you know, I sit on this podcast interviewing really interesting people all the time. And even this morning when I did an interview across town with James Ston, he talked about this book twice. And you know, laws have been changed around the world inspired by this book. And we're actually seeing an increase of laws in the UK. I mean, Australia just banned, I think, social media for people.

Stephen: You met with Mcronone, right?

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen: Could you ever have imagined? And actually, what does the success of this book say?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Jonathan: About society. No, thank you for that question because, you know, I I do tend to get, you know, as you've heard, I mean, I'm extremely alarmed about these trends and these are gigantic threats beyond what anyone can imagine. But here's the amazing thing is that we can reverse this for almost no money and it's completely bipartisan and it's not that hard to do. Um, and we're doing it. And so what happened was, you know, I wrote the book as an American assuming that we don't have a functioning legislature. The Congress can be stopped. We have a vetocracy. The social media companies can stop anything in the house. So I wrote this assuming, you know, we'll never get legislation. Um, so we have to do this on our own. And I proposed four norms. No smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone free schools, and far more independence free play responsibility in the real world. So four norms. We can try to do this with collective action locally at the school level.

Jonathan: Two things that surprised me. One are that immediately governors from red states and blue states started reaching out to me. Our states actually function. Our states have governments that are accountable to the people and that are trying to get good results. And so this has been a totally bipartisan issue. Sarah Huckabe Sanders from Arkansas was one of the very first Kathy Hokll also. And it is it tends to be more female legislators and governors or spouses of heads of state. And the moms, the book really spoke to moms because moms around the world, they felt the kids being pulled away. I believe they felt it viscerally more than the dads did. Also, the dads kind of like the video games. They're a little more pro tech. So, I think the moms felt the pain more and took it more personally. So, when the book came out, mothers around the world jumped into action, formed groups, pushed for legislation, and changes began happening. What I just I just I was just I was in Davos and then London and Brussels two weeks ago and what I saw was a complete sea change in the world's thinking about how we need to have age limits on social media and other tech. And here's what I think just happened. It's it's so cool. It just dawned on me literally while I was in London. Like I was pushing on open doors everywhere. Wherever I went, people wanted to do this. I went to the EU, they want to do this. Like what is happening? And what I realized is this. Steven Pinker has a book out last year called When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. It's about the immediate change in a social system when private knowledge, you know, everybody knows that the emperor has no clothes. Everybody knows that this, you know, ideology doesn't work. Everybody knows that, but they don't all know that everybody else knows it and that everybody else knows that. And so in the emperor's new clothes, everybody thought he's I I don't think he has any clothes on, but maybe, you know, maybe only wise people can see it. But when the child says, "The emperor has no clothes." And then in the Hans Christian Anderson story, it says, "And the people began whispering to each other and then they all cried out in unison." And that's what happened when Australia's law went into effect. So I believe that uh December 10th of last December was the global turning point in the battle to reclaim childhood and if we reclaim that we move on to our attention and adult life as well. What happened on on December 10th? The Australia law went into effect. Sky didn't fall. People weren't locked out of their accounts. All the companies complied. They shut down 5 million uh accounts for Australia's three and a half million kids that were underage uh 2 and a half million kids. this sky didn't fall. And there was a lot of news coverage around the world of what Australia was doing. And a lot of the news coverage included opinions from the writers saying, "Why can't we do that? Hey, let's do that here." And when everybody saw that everybody was looking at Australia and saying, "Let's do that here." Then everybody knew that everybody knew that this is just completely bonkers to have children being raised on social media platforms talking with anonymous strangers and being fed algorithm algorithmically curated garbage. So I believe that that's why 2026 is going to be the year when at least 15 countries are going to commit to passing an age minimum law. In 2025 it was one Australia and now we already have Indonesia. Their law goes into effect in March. Uh I met with Macron in in Davos and a few days he was preparing to push a bill through the assembly and he got it. He's the first in the EU but a lot of other countries in the EU are going to follow. The whole EU is likely to do it. Um, so, so yes, I am incredibly alarmed about how big this problem is, but I'm incredibly inspired that the whole world is rising up to do something about it. We actually can control our fate, and that was not clear before December 10th.

Adi: Bravo. As a mother, that was the first thing I said to you. The first thing I said to you was, "Thank you as a mom for changing my family's life."

Jonathan: Thank you, Liy.

Stephen: It's a really special accomplishment, Jonathan. You know, I could there's no real words that I could say that could quite capture the long-term impact that that's going to have on billions of people's lives. And not just the direct, but also the indirect in all the ways we've described, their ability to form connections, to fall in love, to find meaning and purpose in their lives. and their neuroscience and therefore you know the neuroscience of their their children and their children's children and so on. So it's a really it's a really overwhelming accomplishment.

Jonathan: It it well it was a bizarre situation that I walked into with the unique abilities of a social psychologist. That is everybody was upset about this. Everybody could see it but they thought well this is my problem or in my family we have this problem and um and I came to this with fresh eyes. My dissertation was on moral development. I'd studied adolescent behavior longer ago in my career and I've written about it in all my books. So, it wasn't totally new to me. But I came into the field of social media studies around 2018 2019. I really immersed myself in it. And it was like, you know, you walk in and immediately you see, wait, this is a trap. People are on it because people are on it and the kids are complaining about that. Everyone's complaining about it and the only reason they can't get off is because everyone else is on it. So, I think I was able to see that. And then also CO confused us for a few years. So it wasn't until CO was in the rearview mirror that it was possible for everybody to say, "Wait, this is crazy." And so I was incredibly lucky in terms of the timing. My book happened to come out in March of 2024 just as the world was ready to see like, wait, what have we done to our kids? Let's undo it.

Stephen: And you said you're now focusing more on short form video. So yes, so in studying older Gen Z, these are the people who went through puberty uh on Instagram. Um I should if I could just lay out that it's very important to get the timing to that everyone understands the timing because this is what you mentioned the poly crisis before. The poly crisis I believe begins between 2010 and 2015. Here's why. So we've had the internet for a long time and it was marvelous. We love the internet in the 90s. It's going to be the best friend of democracy. Okay? And then the iPhone comes out. It's amazing. Oh my god, this does so many things. Everything seems great. Okay, so in 2010, most of almost all of us have flip phones. The iPhone's spreading, but it's still mostly flip phones. Teens are all on flip phones, basic phones, and we call those people millennials. If you finished puberty by 20, if you if you were born in say 1990 and you start puberty uh in 2002, you're done by 2008. So, you know, in there. Um if you got through puberty before you got on Instagram, you're a millennial. Whereas, if you're born, say, well, if you're born after 1995, but let's say if you're born in the year 2000, you begin puberty in 2012

Stephen: and you're not done until 2016, 2018. So, in 2010, everyone has a flip phone with no front-facing camera, no high-speed internet. You have to pay for your text. So, you use it to call people and to text them, and that's it. It was a communication device. And that's why the millennials have good mental health. They are the last mentally healthy and successful generation.

Stephen: But if you're Gen Z, you got uh 2012 is the year that now most people now have a smartphone. It's the year that Facebook buys Instagram. They don't change it at first, but that's the year that all the girls go on it. Um, everyone now has high-speed data, front-facing camera. Came out in 2010. So by 2015, we're in a radically different world for children's development. It's now radically different, much more hostile to human development. And that's what we did to Gen Z and now we're doing to Gen Alpha. For politics, it was, you know, it was crazy for all sorts of reasons in every decade. And especially, you know, the in the early 2000s, there's a lot there's a culture war going on. There's all kinds of stuff going on. But it was when it was when everyone has really Twitter was the biggest perpetrator of this. when everyone has Twitter and everyone's checking all the time and anything can blow up. You know, you described the way there was, you know, variance in in on Tik Tok. Um, if you get it just right, it can blow up. You can have huge impact. That's when the democrac democracy is a conversation when it moved from newspapers and, you know, even simple web bulletin boards when it moved to super viral retweet buttons all of that. That's all 2010 to 2015. So that's why since then everything has been insane and it's going to just keep getting more insane. And that's why I believe we have this poly crisis because it it there's more to it. It's not just the technology, but I believe the transformation of our our connection and our information flow and our addiction, all of that is radically different by 2015 compared to how it was in 2010. And now everything else builds on top of that, I believe. What What do you think? Do you think that makes sense?

Stephen: I think there's one more data point to add and that 2014 was the year that things really was the tipping point like you say.

Jonathan: Yes. That's Yes. That's the year that I point to too. Yes.

Stephen: Yeah. So before

Adi: what do you point to? What what you look at the data you see that time spent alone when you compare when you look at data from like the 1960s to 2014

Adi: there it was kind of stable. Americans spending time alone spending time with friends.

Stephen: Yeah.

Adi: Kind of the same. Right. So people spent kind of same amount of time with friends, same amount of time alone over those decades. 2014 marks a shift and there is a steep rise in time spent alone and a drop in time spent with friends. And so what happens in 2014? It is when the majority of Americans get a smartphone.

Adi: And it's not to say again we've said you know causality correlation which is it but there is like based on everything that we've talked about my gosh is there an association between that this is not to say that time spent alone you know when I share this data people may say you know but I like spending time alone I'm not lonely I'm okay this is not about being an introvert or an extrovert it's not about you know you can have solitude and feel great and you're not lonely but we are human beings and we are social creatures. This is just how we are built evolutionarily. And so that is a real red flag when you have this big jump in time spent alone very much the same year. And so my work focuses on adults Jonathan on kids but there's this you know that's the moment right 2014 where everything changed.

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Stephen: So, what do we do about this? Because when I look at all the stats, we did all these audience surveys ahead of this. People are spending roughly in our audience about 6 and a half hours a day on their phones. Um, short form video is only going to get more addictive. AI is going to know me more. It's going to be more personalized. The content is going to be generated just for me.

Stephen: Yeah. What what am I what what's next? Is it a law we need to pass? Is it something I need to do myself?

Jonathan: So we I think we need to pick the lowhanging fruit first. And the reason for that is not just efficiency. It's that we have to prove that we can actually do something because we've never done anything. We've never done anything to restrain this. We've let Silicon Valley run wild. Congress gave them special protection. Section 230. Nobody can sue them for killing their kids if if they feed them content. They can't be held responsible.

Stephen: I think section 230 is probably something worth explaining.

Jonathan: Sure. The communications decency act 1997 I think it it was pleasure miners a year. Uh there's a section in it that the goal was to specifically let the tech companies like AOL back then you know let them take down pornographic content because they were afraid if we take down anything then we're responsible for everything and now we're going to it's going to be end you know. So Congress specifically said no don't worry don't worry you know if you choose to take something down nobody can sue you for you know for what you leave up. So, it was a good intention originally, but the courts have interpreted so widely as to say, "No one can regulate social media. They're not responsible for hurting kids. You can't sue them." And they have never faced a jury. They have never, no parent has ever gotten justice from them despite all the kids whose lives have been ruined. All the kids are dead. And that's going to change. That's changing just now here in February in Los Angeles. So because the US Congress sort of set up this problem and it also in a different law said how old does a kid have to be before a company can take their data without their parents knowledge or permission before a company can expose them to all kinds of stuff before a company can have them sign away their rights? How old? And the original law said 16. Let's try 16. You know cuz you know it wasn't so sick and twisted back then 1998 caught by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. So, but various lobbying they pushed it down from 16 to 13 and they gutted enforcement. So, as long as and that's why all over the internet it's are you 13 or what's your birth year and as long as you're 13 you're in for porn and you have to say you're 18. So, because we the it's a few laws that set this up. We definitely need laws to undo it especially for kids. So, what I'm advocating is let's do the easy stuff the high impact stuff for kids because that is totally not politically controversial. There is no left-right divide on that and that's been true everywhere. Australia, Britain, the EU, everywhere.

Jonathan: Regulating the internet for adults, regulating social media for its destructive properties in democracy is a hell of a lot harder. And I don't have easy answers. There's a lot we could do to reduce the verality, the spread of of the because extreme. So there are lots of little things that we can do. And Francis Hogan, the Facebook whistler, had all kinds of ideas. So we definitely can do things to make it less toxic for democracy. But those are going to be politically controversial because one side is going to benefit from more than the other. So it's going to be very difficult to do. I don't know if we can do them in the US. But let's just all do the let's just all protect the kids. That way we show globally that we actually can do something. And if we do that then I think we will be able to do some basic things about AI like no companion chat bots if you're under 18. You know these things already have a body count. A lot of kids have been encouraged to kill themselves. they already have driven million or hundreds of thousands or millions of people into psychosis. So, we'll be able to, I believe, put some limits on uh on AI, especially for kids. But if we can't get this, if we can't win on social media for kids, then I don't think we have any chance to regulate AI, it's going to be much more difficult. What do you think? What do you think we should do? And what do you think we can do?

Adi: So, my work as a doctor, I think about what we can do and how I can empower people to first build awareness. So, you know, I aim to first normalize and validate the experience with everyone who is engaging with chat bots. And so, I don't like to shame people because as a doctor, right, like you want you want to meet the patient where they are. And so, I won't shame someone to say, you know, why are you using this um why is your boyfriend AI or why are you getting married to AI or why are you using AI for a therapist? One of my followers on social media, it still makes me laugh. I put out a call saying, "Why are you using AI as your as a therapist, you know, and so someone wrote to me, it was great. I screenshotted. It said,"Because all human therapists are trash." With a trash can emoji and it made me laugh and I said, you know,

Adi: so there is. So to me, when I think about what's happening and what we can do,

Adi: it's no mistake that we're here right now. So the pandemic, like we've talked about, was a huge driver. social isolation, uh, hyper reliance on self, right?

Adi: Then the proliferation of technology that replaced human interaction, Zoom board meetings, Zoom funerals, Zoom birthday parties, Zoom graduations, things that we did in person are now online. And then

Adi: personally as a doctor, I was a talking head during the pandemic for lots of news channels about the vaccine. I have a background in public health as well. a immense distrust and mistrust in establishment and experts. And so it's like, I'm going to do my own research. I'm not going to go see a doctor or a therapist. I'm going to talk to my chatbot. And also, I mean, you know, let's keep it real, the cost, right? So people are struggling. They're in financial crisis. it there's an unmet need yes for human connection but also for good therapy or you know good medical care because there is such a need because of the pandemic and people aren't getting the care that they need they deserve there's so many factors here and so what I've been focusing on this year particularly is learning about AI chat bots how they are influencing mental health what is actually happening because I'm a human first AI second person it's like my work focuses on high touch and AI is high tech and this is the first intervention that we are seeing that is high tech that is becoming high touch and that scares me

Stephen: and you're writing a book about that at the moment right

Adi: I am and so

Stephen: bot brain

Adi: it's called bot brain how to stay calm resilient and human in the face of AI and so really thinking about how are we going to be able to live with this technology I love Jonathan stance is to say out AI AI companions done kids. Yeah,

Stephen: for kids. Yeah.

Adi: Until proven safe.