The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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?
00:24:48 · Anna Lembke
[00:24:48] S3: Well, you're absolutely right. Alcohol consumption is going down broadly across The United States. I like to think that's at least in some part due to increased awareness about the harms of alcohol, but I think you're absolutely right. Some of this is just trading addictions or compulsive sort of, you know, addictive tendencies to our devices, to digital media, to the Internet. Some of the fastest rising addictions, and the numbers are very hard to get on this because the people who have them don't disclose them, and they're otherwise also just hard to get, are addiction to pornography and compulsive masturbation, addiction to online gambling, especially sports betting, addiction... We've talked about social media, gaming in all its various forms, massive uptick in addictions to online shopping, and sort of consumptive behaviors more broadly. So those are really leading the charge. There are gender differences here as well, where we have more women getting addicted to social media and online shopping, more men to pornography and sports betting. But, you know, we have plenty of men and women in those opposite categories. So, yeah, the the landscape of sort of teenage rebellion has really changed. You know, the teenage rebel used to be the kid that went out and, like, disappeared in the world and, yeah, drank maybe, used drug... Experimented with drugs. Now you could almost say that the the teenage rebel today doesn't leave their room, doesn't get off their devices, doesn't speak to their parents, you know, has gone virtually mute, is absolutely refusing to participate in any aspect of life. In Japan, they've... They have a name for this, hikikomori, which is kids who just literally disappear inside their rooms and behind their screens.
00:26:42 · Scott Galloway, Anna Lembke
[00:26:42] S2: I literally think there's millions of young men that we don't see. [00:26:48] S3: Yes.