The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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.
00:26:48 · Scott Galloway
[00:26:48] S2: That are living with their parents in their basements, living, you know, quiet lives. You know that saying about millions of men live quiet lives of desperation. I think there's millions of young men living quiet lives of isolation. Yes. And we just don't see them. And it's not even that they're criminals or that they're joining the Taliban or that they're not necessarily inherently bad people. They're just, They've just disappeared. Yeah, that's They're just invisible to the world, invisible to themselves. And they wake up in their late twenties and they don't have, maybe they're overweight, they're anxious, they're fearful, and they've never learned the skills to have friends, mentors, mates get into an office, figure out how to get along with others. They just kind of become almost unsavable. Do you think there's a role, and this comment is pregnant with a question, this question is pregnant with a comment, so I'll just make the comment. I would like to see, and maybe they have this, in junior and senior years in high school, I think it's gotta start pretty early, something resembling what I'll call an adulting curriculum. Just very open and honest conversations around, I remember taking psych 10 at UCLA and it changed my life because I'm like, oh wait, insecurity is a thing. I'm not the only person that feels imposter syndrome doesn't. I mean, of these neuroses I learned about, I'm like, wait, that's an actual thing other people had? I thought it was just me. And it was so helpful. I wished that in an earlier stage, I mean, things like, what is interest rate on a credit card? I lived alone with my mom. Like I wish someone had kind of dialed me in as a young man into this thing called menopause and what your mom might be going through. Do you think if you, and I imagine you are, asked to consult to different lawmakers, governor, Governor Newsom calls you and says, how do we better prevent bad behaviors in high school? Is it education? Is it coursework? Like what, if you could have influence over the curriculum of all the public schools in California, what would that influence look like?
00:29:03 · Anna Lembke
[00:29:03] S3: Yeah. Wow. Great question. So first, just going back to some of your earlier commentary about how men have disappeared. The statistics bear this out. Men are not entering... Men and young men and of all ages are not not entering the job market. So we have a ballooning number of young men who are not working, and the data suggests that it's because they're at home, you know, playing video games and on social media. So they're they're literally not engaging, you know, with their milestones at their... At various ages. In terms of how to change the curriculum, I would recommend three things. Number one, I would teach young people about the neuroscience of pleasure and pain, and about how as we continue to bombard our reward pathway with highly reinforcing substances and behaviors, we don't get more pleasure. We get the opposite. We change our hedonic or joy set point, and we actually tilt our mood and our baseline capacity for pleasure to the side of pain such that we need more and more over time, more and more of our drug of choice to get any pleasure at all. And when we're not using, you know, we're in misery. We need to use just to feel normal. I think this is really key for young people to understand that what feels good or pleasurable or reduces anxiety or depression or insomnia in the moment actually probably makes that worse in the long run because our brains will immediately adapt to that surge of dopamine. So I think that's really important. Number two, embodied anything. So way more curriculum that involves using our bodies, using our hands, doing real things in the real world. So this is for... And, you know, a lot of people have talked about this, but I I really think this is important. Lots of options for sports, for engagement in sports. Mhmm. They actually did this experiment in Iceland. It was called... You know, they they had a a growing youth drug and alcohol problem.