The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:06:14 · Scott Galloway
[00:06:14] S2: So I wanna talk about social media, and that's sort of my go to for the world's ills. As I immediately look like, what social media has done to cause this? But even before that, as a parent, I adopted, I forget, I saw this wonderful movie with Gene Hackman and Ben Stiller where the protagonist Ben Stiller's wife passes away and all he thinks about is protecting his kids. And it's a movie from about twenty years ago. And it really struck me because I remember my youngest broke his arm when he was like, I don't know, maybe four or five. And my partner was just so upset and said, we need to rearrange the living room. I'm like, we're doing no such thing. And I remember when I was in elementary school, it was like the outpatient emergency room. There were kids with eye patches. Remember signing casts? That was a thing. Someone always had a cast and we'd sign it. Right. And you don't want them in danger, but you do want them in uncertainty and risk. And I used to leave my mom's house on a Saturday at 9AM with a Schwinn bike and Abba Zaba bar and 35¢. And she wouldn't see me for twelve hours. And in those twelve hours, I faced a lot of uncertainty and even mild amount of danger, whether it was, you know, roaming stray dogs or, you know, sixth graders who like to beat up second graders. And I think that was good for me. And I find that we inevitably, you know, if my kids are fifteen minutes late home from school, we call MI6. And so talk about even before they have screens, what parenting, what role parenting or over parenting, I'll say, plays in all this.
00:07:59 · Anna Lembke, Scott Galloway
[00:07:59] S3: Yeah. So this is hugely relevant. You know, I think many of us, maybe not you, but many of us are guilty of kind of trying to raise our kids in these padded cells so that they are insulated from any kind of pain or uncertainty so that we can also reduce our anxiety. And and in many ways, it's a kind of a codependent phenomenon where we are protecting our kids so that we're not experiencing the anxiety about how they might get hurt or fail in some way. You know? And as a result, we are raising a generation of young people that has no tolerance for uncertainty and also no kind of psychological touchstone for resilience, for knowing that they can encounter failure, that they can have a negative experience, and it's gonna be okay, and they can lift themselves up. And the technology really exacerbates this problem. I mean, the ways in which we can now track our children from infancy, you know, with a device in the other room to make sure that their breathing is okay. And, of course, these are natural worries that parents have. [00:09:09] S2: Mhmm.
00:09:09 · Scott Galloway, Anna Lembke
[00:09:09] S2: Mhmm. [00:09:10] S3: But we're now mediating this anxiety through these devices, which only make it worse because they play into our sort of obsessive compulsive loops of wanting constant reassurance. And one thing we know about OCD is that the more we look for and get reassurance, the more OCD or anxious we become. It's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. So, yeah, it's and we see that at the university level. I mean, here at Stanford, we see, you know, these wonderful young people who have enormous gifts and talents and promise for the future, But like any bit of uncertainty or even the hint of imperfection just sends them reeling. It's like there's no ballast to hold all that.
00:09:56 · Scott Galloway
[00:09:56] S2: One of the reasons I love speaking to you is I feel like I get free therapy from those qualified person in the world. So back to me and my kids, I worry what I see. I want to see if you see this path that I see. And that is people think I would have had technology figured out in our home. I wrote a book warning the world about technology in 2017. And the cobbler's kids have no shoe here, no shoes. My kids are, especially my youngest, device addiction will you know, fib, take TikTok into the bathroom. You know, just we're literally, we've just screwed it all up. Anyway, what I see is this constant action reaction, Dopa, action reaction stimulus, AI million times a second with content to just keep them glued and the Dopa flowing. And what I worry about... I mean, I used to come home and watch five hours of cartoons for, I guess, a milder shot of Dopa or occasionally sneak into my dad's garage to get a peek at a Playboy for another dopa hit, right? Something. Right. And what I see though, is now that they have the IV connected to them six hours a day and that constant cycle of dopa, and then you take the device away, that is the first time I've ever seen addiction up close. The lying, the negotiating, the outbursts, the inability to emotionally regulate. It's like, oh, I'm living with an addict. I mean, this this is just what an addict acts like. Is all of this is social media, are the largest companies in the world basically creating the mother of all on ramps to addiction to other things later in life?
00:11:41 · Anna Lembke
[00:11:41] S3: Short answer, yes. That is exactly what is happening. These platforms are not just powerful tools. They're also very potent drugs. And the... One of the main reasons that they're so potent and so much more potent, let's say, than TV, you know, which people try to analogize to and say, oh, people said TV was the idiot box. This is a totally different level in large part because of our ability to micro control what we're consuming. So a huge part of addiction... People think that addiction is trying to, like, escape control. Addiction is all about control, trying to assert control over our micro experience to change the way they feel. And there's no more immediate way to do that than to swipe right, swipe left, scroll up, scroll down, tap. And it goes right to our visual cortex, which goes right to our brain's reward pathway releasing dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, the same reward pathway that's activated by drugs and alcohol. And you're absolutely right. When kids... People in general, but especially we see this clinically with kids addicted to all forms of digital media, when we take the device away, they go into full on withdrawal. The universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance or behavior are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, depression, and craving. But we also see physiologic or physical symptoms of withdrawal, headache, you know, dizziness, stomach aches. And many of these kids have sort of these rageful temper tantrums flinging themselves against the wall or on the floor. But the thing is it's all time limited. For the most part, if you can create a safe container for these kids, within a couple of days, they'll begin to emerge. And what so many families and parents report is like, oh my gosh. I get my kid back. This person is sort of the person I recognize. They're socialized. They they come and talk to us. They're helping with with chores in the house. And I think this is a really important piece of it. Like, part of addiction is creating personality disorders and sociopathy. I mean, that's sort of inherent. So you talk about the lying. You know, the lying habit is key to any addiction. So, you know, we we really change our personalities when we are addicted, and when we get into recovery and emerge from that, we we restore our sanity. We we return to the people that we are, and we see this all the time in kids.
00:14:06 · Anna Lembke
The other thing I would say is there is a growing body of evidence showing that if you take emotionally distressed youth, and you reduce their time on social media to one hour a day, and you objectively measure that, so you're tracking what they're doing, and you compare that to a control group of youth where you don't change their social media consumption, what you see in the group that reduces social media use to no more than one hour a day is decreases in depression, decreases in anxiety, improvements in sleep, because sleep is a huge part of this and mediates a lot of the emotional distress, Improvements in loneliness and FOMO, fear of missing out. So, yeah, this is a this is a huge and real issue. And again, the technology is not going away. We all know that. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, but we have got to establish a healthier relationship with the technology, and we can't really leave it to parents alone. It's just too hard. You know? Schools have to come on board. The companies that make and profit from these digital devices and digital media have to come on board, which is why the Meta settlement recently was so landmark because it didn't just involve billions of dollars, you know, in sort of retributed payment, but also it involved product design for teen Instagram, which which I think is really momentous. We'll see if it happens and if it helps, but I think it's an important step forward.