The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:15:35 · Scott Galloway
[00:15:35] S0: We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from USA Facts. I've interviewed countless politicians, and if there's one thing we all find disconcerting is when they butcher the facts with some biased half truth. Give us a break already. So when I had the chance to debate conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, our natural response was bring it on. Why? Because it was sponsored by USA Facts, and each debate segment started with a presentation of government data and facts, employment, government spending, income data, housing, and more. The topic, the American dream. Is it still within reach? We argued. We found some common ground. We actually debated, and there were no personal attacks. Watch the full debate on The USA Facts YouTube channel. We think you'll find it unlike any other debate. That is entertaining and informative. We hope you check it out. Support for the show comes from SoFi. Here's the thing. Most traditional banks pay almost nothing in interest, so your money ends up just sitting there twiddling its sums doing nothing. And if your money's doing nothing, it's not doing its job. You work hard for every dollar, so why not put those dollars to work for you? That's where SoFi comes in. With the everything app for smarter money, with SoFi checking and savings, you can easily track your spending and save towards your goals while earning nine times the national average savings rate. You'll get paid up to two days early with direct deposit, and you can access additional FDIC insurance up to 3,000,000 on your deposits through a network of participating banks. You'll pay no account or overdraft fees, and you can also earn a cash bonus when you sign up with eligible direct deposit. You also can organize your savings into vaults for the goals that matter most. Small decisions like this can create big momentum over time. You can open your SoFi checking and savings account today. Head to sofi.com/profgbank to get started. That's sofi.com/profgbank. SoFi checking and savings is offered through SoFi Bank NA member FDIC. Support for the show comes from Yahoo Scout. Life comes with plenty of big questions, when you're taking your first steps into adulthood. When those questions get complicated, you want more than a quick answer. You want reliable information without spending hours searching for it.
00:17:50 · Scott Galloway
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00:18:35 · Scott Galloway
[00:18:35] S2: I do want to get to work, but I think of you as one of the foremost authorities on the very broad topic of addiction. And I've said that people say we're an attention economy. I don't think that's addiction economy. My sense, and I want you to correct me here or edit me, that addiction stems from a healthy place of our instincts. There's a scarcity of salty, sugary, fatty foods. So when we have it in front of us because of industrial production, we gorge. An absence of free safe play. So when we have free safe play on our phone, we get addicted to gambling. An absence of mating opportunities, so if something resembling or a reasonable facsimile of a mating opportunity, we get, and there's industrial production of it, we get addicted to porn. Help us understand when an addiction is forming. And also my other thesis is everyone has addictions, It's just what it is. Is it online shopping? Is it codependency? Is it addiction to food? Is it addiction to affirmation of others? Is it an addiction to money? What is it, right? Everybody has a certain amount of it. Take us back to, if you're a parent, where do you notice kids are beginning to develop? Or even in yourself as a young adult, some type of addiction. And I think part of the problem is we treat it like a monster and we put it in a closet and we all try and ignore it. Not recognizing we're all guilty of some sort of addiction, at least I believe so. Take me to you're a parent. When can you recognize certain addictive tendencies? And how do you start to, if you will, educate a kid around modulation?
00:20:13 · Anna Lembke
[00:20:13] S3: Great. Yeah. I mean, I agree with everything that you just said. I think addiction is the modern plague. It's going to be the major problem that humans face in the foreseeable future because we have created this world of overwhelming abundance and also drugified almost everything that we do and consume by making it more potently reinforcing, more accessible, more novel, more bountiful. Parents need to understand, number one, that digital media are inherently reinforcing and therefore potentially addictive. Moving videos are drugs. Moving videos are drugs. Okay? It doesn't mean that they're... That we should never watch them ever, but they are so potently reinforcing, especially in their short form. But our brains evolved to fixate onto moving images, especially moving images of other humans and other living organisms, and that has become a drug. Quantity and frequency matter. So although we don't base our diagnosis of addiction on quantity and frequency for any substance, it's not that quantity and frequency is irrelevant. It's highly relevant. The more people use, the more they change their brains, the more likely they are to get addicted. Addiction is a brain disease characterized by the continued compulsive use of a substance or behavior despite harm to self and or others. What do we look for? Out of control use, compulsive use, continued use despite consequences. We also look for tolerance, needing more of that drug over time to get the same effect, and also withdrawal, a physiologic negative response when we stop using. What does that look like in kids? Number one, that that looks like a kid who is constantly compulsively seeking more time online. Mhmm. That looks like a kid who's, once they're engaged, is totally transported and entranced. That looks like a kid who, when they get off, plunges into an acute withdrawal phenomenon where they're highly emotionally dysregulated. Why? They're in withdrawal. That looks like a kid who has lost joy in other things that used to give them pleasure, in reading and playing outside, playing with friends in real life, spending time with family, playing with a pet. That looks like a kid who's narrowed their focus where this one thing is the only thing they wanna do, other things become less salient. And that looks like a kid who lies.
00:22:42 · Anna Lembke
So, you know, kids to some extent are going to experiment with lying as they play around with language and try to figure out, you know, what are the boundaries of what language can communicate and not communicate, and, you know... But but really one of the unspoken and sort of not in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, but a key feature of addiction is lying about use, but also developing the lying habit more broadly, just lying about other stuff because lying becomes the sort of modus operandum. I think you're right. This whole monster in the closet, not talking about it, terrified to name it, only makes it worse. That one of the very first recommendations I make for families is not to immediately take the devices away, but to immediately sit down and talk openly about the problem. And I really encourage parents to be transparent about their own addictive patterns, you know, to say to their kids, hey. You're not the only one. I'm also struggling with, you know, consuming x, y, or z. And to really be open about, like, it's a it's a... We're all struggling. Right? It... Difficult for all of us, but let's acknowledge the ways in which our individual lives and our family life has become impoverished because of the ways that we're all in our separate rooms, on our separate devices, consuming our separate digital media.
00:24:11 · Scott Galloway
[00:24:11] S2: In addition to addiction to actual social media itself, how has this constant dopa economy, what addictions has that increased or quite frankly decreased? I see that alcohol consumption is down. I think it's because people are at home because they think a cheaper and easier and lower risk means of getting DOPA doesn't involve going out and drinking alcohol. So I would imagine alcohol addiction has gone down among teens because of social media. What how has social media impacted other addictions, distinctive social media itself?