The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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.
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.