Jonathan Haidt: Why short-form video rewires young brains

Speaker 0:00 You are actively rewiring your brain for the worse by engaging with social media, high volume, quick videos.

Speaker 0:06 And the social media executives don't let their kids use this stuff because they designed it to be addictive, and they know that millions and millions of kids have been cyberbullied, sextorted, many have committed suicide, so I'm getting angry.

Speaker 0:17 And then from the medical perspective, it's rewiring your body, increasing your risk of heart disease and PTSD.

Speaker 0:23 We've moved too far into the virtual world, and the results are catastrophic.

Steven Bartlett 0:27 People are spending roughly about six and a half hours a day on their phones. What do we do about this?

Speaker 0:32 Well, here's the amazing thing: We actually can control our fate. So- We are joined by a social psychologist and a Harvard physician-

Steven Bartlett 0:39 - to dive into the technology addiction and brain rot crisis billions are facing worldwide. And how we can counter its devastating mental health effects.

Speaker 0:48 You have to reclaim your attention, because without the ability to pay attention for several minutes at a time, we're seeing the destruction of human potential, the human relationships, the connection.

Speaker 0:58 But there's all these small tweaks that you can do to override that primal urge to scroll. For example, ninety-one percent of people had an improvement in attention, well-being, and mental health after just two weeks of continuing to use their device, but not having internet access. Next, keep your phone out of your arm's reach, because the sheer potential for distraction has actually been shown to change your prefrontal cortex, which is called brain drain.

Speaker 1:20 So yes, we should exert more self-control, but we're being pushed to addictive apps, and it's messing us all up. That's not our fault.

Steven Bartlett 1:26 Would you advise people to delete these short-form videos?

Speaker 1:29 Oh, my God, yes! That would be the most important thing you can do for your intelligence and for humanity. But if I was going to offer some specific advice, here are the three things that I do with my students to reclaim their attention.

Speaker 1:39 And then to add to that, I have the three-second brain reset. So first...

Steven Bartlett 1:43 I wanted to ask you guys what you thought of this.

Speaker 1:46 Hey, you're back!

Speaker 1:47 This terrifies me.

Speaker 1:48 We've got to stop this now.

Steven Bartlett 1:52 [gentle music] Guys, I've got a quick favor to ask you. We're approaching a significant subscriber milestone on this show, and roughly sixty-nine percent of you that listen and love this show haven't yet subscribed for whatever reason. If there was ever a time for you to do us a favor, if we've ever done anything for you, given you value in any way, it is simply hitting that Subscribe button. And it means so much to myself, but also to my team, 'cause when we hit these milestones, we go away as a team and celebrate. And it's the thing, the simple, free, easy thing you can do to help make this show a little bit better every single week. So that's a favor I would ask you, and, um, if you do hit the Subscribe button, I won't let you down, and we'll continue to find small ways to make this whole production better. Thank you so much for being part of this journey. It means the world, and, uh, yeah, let's do this. [upbeat music] Jonathan,

Steven Bartlett 2:40 Aditi. Jonathan, I've heard you say that the destruction of attention is the largest threat to humanity that's happening around the world. And I've also heard you say that short-form videos are the worst of the worst because they're shattering attention spans. The reason why I wanted to have this conversation today is somewhat personal, and in fact, all of the conversations I have in the Diary are somewhat personal to some degree. Um, they're inspired by some unanswered question I have in my head and also some observation I have in my life, and the observation I've had is that short-form videos, in particular, are making my life worse. And actually, I've got to say, the catalyst moment, really, where I thought, "Do you know what? I need to get you exceptional people together to have this conversation," was I thought this, I then looked at my screen time and saw a huge change. I felt so much worse because all these social platforms have short-form video now, and then I actually heard Elon Musk, who, you know, has a, a social media platform that does short-form video, say that he thinks it's one of the worst inventions for humanity.

Speaker 3:40 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 3:41 Jonathan, why did you say what you said about short-form video-

Speaker 3:44 Mm-hmm

Steven Bartlett 3:44 ... and this, uh, corruption of attention?

Speaker 3:46 Yeah. Because I wrote a whole book called The Anxious Generation, focusing on teen mental health. That was the mystery that popped up in the mid-two thousands: Why are people born after nineteen ninety-five so much more anxious and depressed? And I've been tracking down that mystery, and it points-- a lot of it points to social media, and especially Instagram, social comparison, all the things we know about social media. When the book came out in twenty twenty-four, since then, what I realized is that I vastly underestimated the damage because I focused on mental health, which is a catastrophe, but the bigger damage is the destruction of the human ability to pay attention. Without the ability to pay attention for several minutes at a time, ideally ten or twenty minutes at a time, without that, you're not going to be of much use as an employee, you're not going to be of much use as a spouse, you're not going to be successful in life, and that's when I realized this is way beyond mental health. This is changing human cognition, changing human attention, and possibly on a global scale.

Steven Bartlett 4:47 Aditi, what perspective do you come at this from, and what's been your perspective through all the work you've done about brains and stress and neuroscience and all these kinds of things that has shaped the way that you think about social media, screen time, short-form video?

Speaker 5:01 My background is that I'm a physician at Harvard, and, it, my expertise is in stress, burnout, and mental health. And so that is the lens that I view all of this through. We know that the most deleterious relationship that you have is with your device. You know, in every healthy relationship, we have boundaries. We have boundaries with our kids, our parents, our colleagues, our, you know, w- with our friends, and yet we have no boundaries, and often porous boundaries, when it comes to the relationship you have with your device. So it's not so much about, you know, becoming a digital monk and renouncing technology, because technology can serve us, right? It inspires, educates, connects. Now more than ever, it's so important to be an informed citizen, but not at the expense of your mental health. And so what Jonathan was saying, this, you know, constant being engaged with your devices, with social media, the scrolling from the minute you wake up until you go to bed, there's a reason why you have your best ideas in the shower.

Steven Bartlett 6:00 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 6:00 And that's because that's the only place in the whole day where you are not with your device. People take their device to the bathroom. They sleep with your device. You eat with your device. People walk down the street. There's more near-miss pedestrian accidents because people are walking while they're crossing the street and, um, looking at their devices. And so there's all of this brain biology at play behind the scenes. So both of you have talked about how it doesn't feel good to engage and constantly be on your phone, that sense of infinite scroll, but there is-- you know, it feels like you're doing nothing. You're just doing this, right? What are you doing? But in fact, it is not passive. It is active, and it has a profound effect on your biology, on your brain, on your psychology, and also social factors that I hope

Speaker 6:44 we talk about today.

Steven Bartlett 6:45 You know, scrolling, wasting a bit of time, doesn't seem so harmful.... W- what is the big, if we play this forward ten, 20, 30 years, what is the big risk or threat?

Speaker 6:55 The biggest threat right now, we don't even have to wait 20 years, is that it, through a process called neuroplasticity, which is just a big, fancy word that simply means that your brain is a muscle, is that by engaging with social media, that that sense of high volume, low quality, quick videos, you are actively rewiring your brain for the worst. So you're increasing your sense of stress, worsening your mental health, attention, cognition, distractibility, irritability, complex problem-solving. All of that changes when you engage in, engage in that infinite scroll.

Speaker 7:28 Yeah, I'd like to a- add on here, because one of the main arguments I get is, "Ah, this is what they said about television. Oh, this is what they said about comic books. This is just another moral panic." But people need to understand why touch screen devices are so different from television. And so I th-- parents find this helpful, if I just lay this out briefly: good screen time versus bad screen time. So humans are storytelling animals. We have always, as long as we've had language, we've raised our kids with stories, epic poems, all kinds of stories. Stories are good. Sto-- the human brain needs lots of patterns. The child's brain needs lots of patterns to develop. So the worst thing you can do is hand your child a device because they're crying for it, 'cause they've been tr- they're trained to get it, and you're busy, so you hand, hand them the device. They're quiet. What's happening? They're sitting alone, not... You know, when I was a kid, we always watched with my sisters, with my friends. You're arguing about it. You're talking, it's social. Kid's sitting alone with a device in his hand. It's not long stories. It's never long stories. It always ends up at YouTube Shorts or TikTok or Instagram Reels for older kids. So they're doing, they're doing this, but here's the key thing that it does that a television does not. A television puts you in a state that psychologists call transportation. You get into a story, and you find yourself pulled in, and you're rooting for the characters, and this is, this is how a brain gets tuned up to social patterns. But it can't happen in ten seconds. It can't happen in one minute. It takes a long period of time, and there is no reinforcement. There is no-- the television doesn't do anything to you. You don't have any response, whereas a touch screen device is a Skinner box. So B.F. Skinner was one of the founders of behaviorism, and he put rats and pigeons in a box where he could deliver a re- reinforcement, a little grain of food, on a schedule, and by giving them quick reinforcements for behavior, he could train them to do amazing tricks in just a few hours. When you give your kid a touch screen device, it's stimulus, response, swipe, get a reward or not, variable ratio, and then i- and, and you just keep doing that. So you are, as Aditi said, it is rewiring your brain. It's not just wasting time. It is literally training you to do things where television didn't do that. So this is a whole new game.

Speaker 9:40 And to add to that, you know, from the medical perspective, you're shortening this attention span, and what happens over time is, so like Jonathan said, right, you're not sleeping as well because you are engaged with your device. We know that eighty percent of people are checking their phones within minutes of waking up. We have something called revenge bedtime procrastination, this concept of, you know, at the end of the day, you're fatigued, you've had a long day, you've had no me time, and you want to get to bed early. We all know, by the way, what the data is, that, you know, we've been taught since we were little kids, right? Like, bedtime, sleep is important. It's good for your body, it's good for your brain, and we might have all the knowledge in the world, but in terms of action, there's a wide gap between knowledge and information and action. And so revenge bedtime procrastination is kind of an offshoot. So what happens? So, you know, you have that decreased attention. You have that irritability, hypervigilance, and so at night, at the end of the day, it's 9:00 PM, you finally-- you know, if you're a parent, your kids are asleep, your kitchen is clean, maybe you finished your entrepreneurial day, and you finally sit down with Melanie on the couch, and you're like, "Ah, some me time." And you know you want to get to bed early, and you know it's good for you, but then suddenly you're scrolling, and before you know it, it's 2:00 AM, and you're saying, "Oh, my God, what happened? Why am I still awake? What was I doing all this time?" What happens is that you essentially give yourself some me time at night, and so you procrastinate bedtime. And so what happens is, with this revenge bedtime procrastination, it affects your sleep, and then when you don't have good sleep, good quality sleep, so you have difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, sleep debt over time for kids, for adults, has all sorts of ramifications. So this is just the tip of the iceberg, this short-form video content, and the ripple effects go far and wide. Not only is it rewiring your brain, it's rewiring your body. It is affecting your sleep, which increases your risk of heart disease later in life. And, uh, when you're consuming graphic videos and graphic images, it can increase your personal risk of PTSD through vicarious trauma, even if you weren't there. So this is just a vast network of things that can happen to you simply because you're thinking, "Yeah, it's harmless. What is it? It's just a bunch of videos that I'm checking out as a way for me to decompress."

Steven Bartlett 11:53 What do I need to know about the nature of the brain to understand exactly what short-form video is, is playing- is hijacking, is taking advantage of?

Speaker 12:03 The thing to understand about, uh, all of this, uh, is that we have to focus on childhood. Why do we have childhood? Um, humans have this really interesting childhood, where we, we grow rapidly at first, and then we slow down for about five or seven years. We don't grow very quickly, and then we speed up at puberty, whereas other primates, they just grow and grow till they reach reproductive age, then they reproduce. But we seem to have this long period of sort of middle childhood for cultural learning. It's a period in which the, the kid is now walking and talking and turning away from the parents, and, and that's a time for this to come in, and they pay attention, and they form relations. All these things have to happen slowly 'cause the neurons are gradually growing. They're finding each other based on what the child is doing, okay? So we grow up in the real world, and, and that happens over time, and a lot of that is very physical. Kids are very physical. Mammals are very physical, and there's a lot of touch.... So that's a healthy human childhood. But when you give an iPad or a, or your old iPhone, and they can- they begin doing the, the touching and swiping, that is gonna hijack their attention. That is gonna push out all other forms of action and learning, and that is going to change the way the parts of the brain that learn to pay attention, what's called executive function, it's gonna change the way the brain learns to pay attention. It's gonna change the reward circuits. I think you had Anna Lembke on recently, who's our, our, the nation's expert on addiction, and the way that she describes it, how, you know, any one addiction is gonna change your reward pathways to make you more vulnerable to other addictions. So we're setting our kids up not just for this, but then when they get a little older, it'll be video games, it'll be, uh, porn, it'll be gambling. Now everything is gambling. So we're setting them up for a life in which their brain is saying: "Give me something-- Give me some quick dopamine. Give me some quick dopamine. I don't wanna, I don't wanna have to work for anything. I don't wanna have to apply myself for an hour and then get a reward." And so the, what the, what the short videos are doing for kids is preventing them from learning the connection between hard work and a reward.

Steven Bartlett 14:03 Is there anything else I need to know from a neuroscience perspective about what's going on in my brain when I'm, when I develop these addictions with short-form videos or these sort of quick dopaminergic tasks?

Speaker 14:14 So we all, as humans, have a primal urge to scroll. When you feel a sense of stress, as many of us do in this moment in life, it is your sense, you know, your amygdala, and so it's your sense of self-preservation. It's survival and self-preservation. That is what your amygdala does. So if you want me to show you here-

Steven Bartlett 14:31 I'll just show you, 'cause I have no idea what I'm doing there. [chuckles]

Speaker 14:32 Yeah, it's okay. So here, deep here, it's a small almond-shaped structure, and that is your amygdala. And your amygdala, its main purpose is survival and self-preservation. It houses your stress response, your fight-or-flight response, and it is truly what is activated when you are engaging in content, when you feel a sense of stress, and so you have this primal urge to scroll. And so evolutionarily, we, we, when we all were cave people living, um, together, we would sleep at night, and there would be a night watchman scanning for danger. And now we have our-- we have become our own night watchman, and so we scan for danger all day, all night long. How do we do that? We scroll, and then the amygdala is triggered, and then you scroll some more, and you scroll some more, and you scroll some more. And so over time, what you're doing is that you're making that amygdala in a state of, of chronic... It's continually being triggered. What happens to the amygdala?

Steven Bartlett 15:27 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 15:27 Over time, when it's continually triggered, it starts to rewire your brain in other ways. And how does it do that? Through something called the prefrontal cortex. If you put your hand... I like-- I can use this model, but I can also just use my hands. When you put your hand on your forehead, the area right behind your forehead, right here, is the prefrontal cortex. This is a very important thing for our conversation, this area of the brain. And what the prefrontal cortex does is it is called-- it governs executive functions, so impulse control, memory, planning, organization, strategic thinking, complex problem-solving. And there is a tension between your amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. When your amygdala is in the driver's seat, that prefrontal cortex is quiet. And what is happening as we continue to engage with our devices and have this primal urge to scroll, that amygdala upregulates, and the prefrontal cortex downregulates, and over time, that is very problematic for all of the reasons that we're kind of introducing at the start of this conversation.

Steven Bartlett 16:29 There was a meta-analysis done in 2025 of seventy-one different studies, and it found that heavy short-form video use was associated with reduced thinking ability, especially shorter attention spans and weaker impulse control.

Speaker 16:41 That's right. These studies are just beginning to roll in now. Um, kids have been on social media really a lot since 2008, but especially once they got smartphones around 2012. Studies began coming in, uh, in the 2010s, that, um, look, it's looking like the kids who are spending a lot of time on this, um, are doing much worse. They're more depressed. The focus was on depression, and some other researchers said: "No, it's just a correlation. You, you, you can't prove causation." And we've been going around and around on this for about ten or fifteen years. Now we're doing the same thing with, uh, with the short-form videos. The damage everyone can see. My students tell me this is what's happening. We feel it. Studies are coming in, but there will be a few studies here and there that don't show it, and people will, uh, push that up. Meta wor-- spends a lot of time and money to influence the public debate. A lot of public documents are coming out now about how they do that. So we can engage in debate over, over research on short-form videos for five or ten years, but at that point, it's way too late. We've lost a second generation, Gen Alpha. So I think when we're talking about kids especially, we need to have what's called the precautionary principle, which is, if there's reason to think that this is hurting kids, how about we don't roll it out into every childhood? How about we make these companies responsible, we hold them responsible for what they're doing to kids? Because we're about to make the same mistake we made with social media, letting it worm its way into childhood. We've already done that with short videos, and we're about to do it with AI chatbots. In fact, we're just beginning it, uh, in, in late 2025, I'd say.

Steven Bartlett 18:13 I, I don't think people quite realize how much these major social media platforms have figured out that s- short-form video sells. Um, we're actually seeing this sort of global rise in short-form drama apps now. I don't know if you guys have seen these apps, but it basically takes a movie that used to be two hours long-

Speaker 18:30 Mm

Steven Bartlett 18:30 ... and it breaks it down into, say, 60 different parts. My, uh, a colleague of mine at my company was showing me the other day, in different parts of the world, they're exploding. There's been a 190% increase in short-form drama apps. Takes a long-form movie, turns it into short-form videos. Disney+ plans to introduce AI-generated short-form videos this year, starting with 30-second limits inside the Disney+ app, and TechCrunch also reported-... that as of October twenty twenty-five, Netflix tested short-form video content on phones and recently announced its plan to expand this feature. It appears-

Speaker 19:00 Mm-hmm

Steven Bartlett 19:00 -that all of the content we consume is going that way. And listen, I'm friends with lots of people at big social media platforms, and this doesn't get me in the-- this doesn't stand in my way of criticizing them, 'cause it, y- I think two things can be true at the same time, right? So I, I think it can be true that I have a podcast, and I make short-form videos-

Speaker 19:15 Mm-hmm

Steven Bartlett 19:15 ... and that I also understand that there's a real downside to them. And, um, all of the major

Steven Bartlett 19:21 social me- social media platforms that I speak to, speak to have a huge drive towards short-form video.

Speaker 19:26 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 19:26 It is-- It appears to be their number-one strategic priority, and obviously, because of the success of TikTok. As of January twenty twenty-six, TikTok, I believe, is the most downloaded social app in the world now. And it, a-and, uh, uh, if I'm running a social media company, and my one focus is profit-

Speaker 19:43 Mm-hmm

Steven Bartlett 19:43 ... I'm now faced with an existential crisis.

Speaker 19:46 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 19:46 I either take part in this thing that is driving the highest retention, therefore, the best ad payouts, or I die.

Speaker 19:54 So there's two comments to that. First off is that, you know, when we think, when we think about social media and how society is shape-shifting to allow this short-form content, there is a concept that Jonathan and I briefly mentioned, I think, prior to us filming, called second screen viewing. And so what's happening is that allegedly, these big streamers are asking their creative talent, whether it's screenwriters or actors or pe- directors, to replay, to reiterate the plot. Because as you're watching... You know, when we were kids, we would watch TV or movies, and you'd just sit on the couch, and you'd have a bucket of popcorn with your family, and you'd watch a movie, an hour, hour and a half, two hours. And now, second screen viewing is happening, which means that you're watching a movie or a TV show, and you're on your device. And so you are constantly having that fragmented attention-

Steven Bartlett 20:45 Mm-hmm

Speaker 20:45 ... and we are all doing it. And so what these streamers are allegedly asking their creative talent to do is to reiterate the plot.

Steven Bartlett 20:52 It makes sense, though.

Speaker 20:52 So it's shape-shifting.

Steven Bartlett 20:54 It makes sense. If my brain is-- You know, I'm thirty-three years old, so I've grown up with a lot of this stuff. If my brain has been wired to have shorter attention spans, and, and, uh, movies from thirty years ago are not gonna cut it for me.

Speaker 21:06 Right, but then look what happens if, if everybody chases that, and I know... Look, Netflix is making shorter and shorter stuff. Even TED, the TED Conference, TED Talks are getting shorter and shorter. What does that do? It just repeats the cycle. Now, I appreciate that you're in a collective action trap, a- as you put it: "If I don't do it, and everyone else is, then I lose out." And so the, the business pressure on, on all the creators, the business pressures go shorter, shorter, shorter. There's a very useful psychological term, distinction here that I think will be helpful, which is the difference between psychological assimilation and accommodation. This goes back to Jean Piaget, the great developmental psychologist. We, we have certain mental structures. We have a, a model in our head of how things work, and, you know, then you learn something new, then, "Oh, that's a..." You know, a kid learns, "Oh, that's a, an aardvark. Okay, I, I put that into..." You know, that's just, you just assimilate. They learn lots of animal names. And then they learn something that's doesn't fit, like you learn about bacteria, and now you have to, "Oh, okay," now you h- you have to, you have to change your mental structure. It takes a little time. You change your mental structure to understand more about life. That's what education really is all about. You have to have a lot of assimilation, of course, but you need that accommodation over and over again. That's why you want to go to college. That's why you want to read novels. That's what a great movie does. It takes time. And so one of the great things about this modern technology is that we can do things like have this three-hour conversation. I can't believe it. People are gonna listen to it. So this, you know, long-form content, this is all about accommodation. Anybody who walks out, uh, who, who, who leaves this conversation after three hours and isn't thinking about something differently, we failed.

Steven Bartlett 22:42 Mm.

Speaker 22:42 Okay? So you are very much in the accommodation business. That's great, and then the st- the question, both a moral and a strategic question, is: How much do you need to play the, the quick-hit game in order to get people there? I leave that to you to do the moral calculation. Maybe it, maybe it balances out, maybe, but, uh, but I think that's where you are.

Steven Bartlett 23:01 Would you advise people to delete these short-form videos?

Speaker 23:04 Oh, my God, yes! Of course. Here, but here... Yes, that would-- the most important thing you can do for your intelligence and for humanity would be delete them. So what I advise my students to do is, I say, "Just do this: just, just delete o- one of the social media apps that you use, especially if it's TikTok. Just delete it from your phone. You can still check on your computer. If someone sends you a video, you can still watch it on your computer. You can even check it, you know, every weekend. You can spend some time on it, but just get it off your phone." Because on the phone, the phone is always with us, an extension of our body, and if it's always there, then it's going to take every... It's called attention fracking. It's gonna break up your attention. It's gonna take every seven seconds that you're not doing something, you're gonna go for the phone. So the best thing you can do to make yourself smarter and a better partner and a better human, I would say would be to delete the short- especially any of the short-form videos, so TikTok. Unfortunately, YouTube, which has a lot of good stuff on it, becomes YouTube Shorts. Instagram, which does a lot of terrible things, but people do find it useful for all kinds of purposes, becomes Instagram Reels. So I think the proper amount of short-form video for children zero to eighteen is zero. They should never be watching the vertical videos. Parents, don't ever let your kids watch the short, vertical videos. You might even, if there, if only there was a way to put a... Is there a way to put a time limit, where you can say it has to be ten minutes or longer? "Kids, you can have an hour of YouTube, but it has to be ten minutes or longer. Nothing shorter than ten minutes." That at least will, uh, get rid of this, the quick, the quick swiping, the, the dopamine stuff.

Speaker 24:29 So I would say that for kids, yes, like, you know, not engaging it whatsoever, but for someone... You know, my approach is a little bit different for someone who's, like, in their thirties-

Speaker 24:40 Mm

Speaker 24:40 ... or in their forties, and the way I would kind of frame that is I- instead of renouncing, you know, saying, "I'm gonna get it off my device, and I'm gonna check on a desktop," which is great, there's cer- little kind of tweaks that we could do, because my approach is to-... foster that sense of empowerment in someone to help them make positive change. And so one strategy that you could use if you are saying, "There's no way I'm getting rid of my-- I'm not deleting-

Speaker 25:07 Mm

Speaker 25:07 ... these apps from my phone," right? If you're-- By the way, I practice what I preach, and I really do-- don't engage in technology as to, to the best of my ability. Um, but one thing that you could do is grayscale your phone. And so especially at night, like it's nine PM, like we talked about, revenge bedtime procrastination, you know that you're going to do it. You're going to sit down, and you're gonna scroll, and before you know it, it's two AM. Instead, grayscale your phone. This simple switch, you can toggle it. I have my phone set to grayscale, which simply means that you're getting rid of your color, making it black and white. And so when it is grayscaled, then you-- you know, it doesn't have that same addictive quality to it. It's like going through a grocery store. A marketing executive described it this way to me: "Going through a grocery store, instead of the technicolor junk food cereal, it's just black and white." So you have a less-- there's a greater sense of compulsion to continue checking. So that's, like, one strategy you could use, and the other is to set some boundaries. So geographical boundaries, keep your phone out of, out of your arm's reach. If you're at, at a desk, if you're a student, not right next to you because we know there's this phenomenon of brain drain.

Speaker 26:13 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 26:13 So it's not just that when you're using your phone, it can have a potential distraction, but also just having it close by. It's called brain drain. And, um, so putting it in a desk drawer, keeping it in another part of the home, if you are working, keeping it far away from you, and so you kind of can override that primal urge to scroll, let your prefrontal cortex take hold again. And so there's all these small tweaks-

Speaker 26:37 Yeah

Speaker 26:37 ... that you can do. You,

Speaker 26:38 you think now.

Speaker 26:39 Yes, there are all these small tweaks you can do, and they will make the heroin a little bit less addictive. And, yeah, you should try those. But what I can say after teaching this course for many years is that people who try that, they s-- they put, "Yeah, you know, it helped. It helped." But you only really get the transformation when you quit social media, that you get your life back, you get hours a day back. So, um, and so I, I would urge everyone to just think, you know, you only, you only get one childhood, you only get one, one, one young adulthood, and if you're gonna spend it scrolling, what do you have to show for it at the end? And when you get people to reflect on, well, how much value do you really get from watching the short videos, what would-- how would your life be different if you, if you knocked it out? Once they realize that their motives for being on it were either just to keep up or because that's what everyone else is doing, or, as you said, "I deserve it because I'm tired." Well, why are you tired? It's in part because your attention was fragmented all day long. So you only really get the transformations when you get a real change in what you're, what you're consuming. Although, of course, yes, setting it to grayscale would be helpful, but it's not gonna be transformative for most people, I believe.

Speaker 27:43 And then, you know, based on the science, you're-- there are certain elements, like when we think about what is it about the phone that is creating that sense of compulsion, Jonathan is right. So what is it about the phone? It's not just the phone, you know, you're scrolling, you're engaging. There are two studies that were really interesting. One, people got off of-- they, they continued to use their devices. They had no internet. So it's like, you know-

Speaker 28:05 Yeah.

Speaker 28:06 ... I tried this experiment myself in December. I was out of the country, and so I just let my-- you know, I didn't plug into Wi-Fi, and I found, you know, markedly a marked change in my mood, my sleep, and I'm not even, you know, twenty years old on TikTok, and it was so different. And so the study found that just two weeks of continuing to use your device but just not having internet access improved your attention, well-being, and mental health. And in this population, it was all adults. It wasn't kids.

Speaker 28:37 Right, it was adults.

Speaker 28:37 It was all adults. Found that ninety-one percent of people had an improvement in at least one of these metrics. And then another study, more recently, um, just one week of not engaging in social media, a digital detox, they called it, did the same thing. Better-- you know, less anxiety, less depression, decreased insomnia. But my feeling is that, you know, there is this new kind of meme, right? Like, your-- the millennial urge to delete, uh, my internet presence and, you know, live off the grid. There is certainly utility to that, and I salute anyone who wants to engage in that analog life more and more. But from my-- from where I sit, I feel like we do need to have healthier boundaries and engage more responsibly. It also builds up that muscle, and it can help... You know, it takes eight weeks to do neuroplasticity. When you're building new brain circuits, it takes eight weeks. Falling off, getting back up is part of habit formation, so if you're going to make any of these changes, understand that it takes some time. But I, I don't know if it is possible, uh, for me or for others to say fully, "I'm going to, you know, delete off of my phone."

Speaker 29:49 So-

Speaker 29:49 But I love that.

Speaker 29:50 Okay. So I'd, I'd like to go, go a little further, um, a little further with this. So the way you, the way you put it, yes, there's all these things that we could do. We should have boundaries. But all of that puts the responsibility on us.

Speaker 30:01 Agreed.

Speaker 30:02 And that's where we are with junk food. With junk food, we're like, "Okay, it's out there. We have to learn self-control. We have to teach self-control to our kids." Okay, that's the way it is in this country. But the digital devices, I think, are very, very different. So imagine

Speaker 30:14 if, imagine if we sent our kids out into the world, and it wasn't just that there was junk food in all the stores, it was that everything was made of junk food. You know, you, you know, door handles, you can eat it, it's chocolate. But it's not just that the world's made of junk food, it's-- they actually can tell, uh, they're able to tell what you're craving at the moment, and maybe you're, you're more in the mood for salt, so n- so now it's all potato chips or pretzels. If the world is designed by companies to always give you the thing that will most grab your unconscious desires, will affect the, the amygdala, the reward centers, that's on them. That's not our fault. My general rule as a social psychologist is if a few people are doing something bad or self-destructive, well, you know, they should learn some self-control, or that's something about them. But when ninety or ninety-five percent of people are doing something self-destructive-... That's because of the companies that put us in an environment that encourages addiction. So I just want to read a quote. We have so much good stuff coming out from Meta, from all the whistleblowers. Now, all the court cases are beginning in Los Angeles. Finally, it's their first time they're gonna-- Meta's gonna face a jury with all the parents who've lost kids. Um, so here is, here's a, a chat. So we have a lot of internal documents that came out from the, the attorneys general that are suing Me- Meta. So while they're talking about the results of some of their internal research, one of them says, uh, "Oh, my gosh, y'all, Instagram is a drug. We're basically pushers. We're causing reward deficit disorder because people are binging on In- Instagram so much they can't feel reward anymore," which is something Anna Lemke said. "Like, the reward tolerance is so high." And then he says, "I know Adam," meaning Adam Mosseri, "I know Adam doesn't want to hear it. He freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my teen fundamentals leads review. But it is undeniable, it's biological and psychological. Top-down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more." This is not on us. They designed it to be addictive. They've done research to make it maximally addictive. They push it on children. They tried to get Instagram Kids for even littler kids. They know what they're doing. They've done the research. My team, we put together-- We found references to thirty-one internal studies that Meta did. They've done a lot of research finding harm. They bury it, but you can find it at metasinternalresearch.org. We put it all online. You can read these quotes. So yes, we should exert more self-control, but basically, we're being pushed addictive substances, addictive, uh, uh, addictive apps, and it's messing us all up.

Speaker 32:46 I agree wholeheartedly that it is so destructive, and you feel like even with people in their forties and fifties, and if anyone can do it, it's you, Jonathan. Seriously, I would love to see it. You know, we also know, based on the data, that these things quite... They, they reshape our brain-

Speaker 33:04 Yeah

Speaker 33:04 ... rewire our brain through neuroplasticity, and also change our brain waves, so patterns. So we talked about the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, right? But they also change brainwaves. And so when you look at studies and the data, it has the reward pathway and dopamine, and these brain patterns, the brainwaves, mimic addictive behaviors. And, you know, that-

Speaker 33:26 Mm-hmm

Speaker 33:26 ... there are certain features, right? Like, when you do swipe down to refresh, it's the slot machine.

Speaker 33:31 It was modeled directly after the slot machine.

Speaker 33:33 Yeah.

Speaker 33:33 Yeah.

Speaker 33:33 Or autoplay or, um, you know, the algorithm, that infinite scroll. Um, one really interesting kind of like breaking news, which you guys may have already heard of, it's like three days ago, the European Union Commission found TikTok to be in breach of the Digital Services Act, and what it said was that it is addictive. It, um, you know, creates compulsion and gets people into this autopilot mode, so they have difficulty disengaging. And personally, I am moving away from social media and really leaning into analog life.

Speaker 34:09 Right.

Speaker 34:09 But I think with the way the world... You know, it's one of our only ways to connect, right? Meaning-

Speaker 34:14 No!

Speaker 34:14 I don't mean connect deeply.

Speaker 34:15 It's become one of our only ways.

Speaker 34:16 I don't mean connect like-

Speaker 34:17 Yeah

Speaker 34:17 ... in a deep way.

Speaker 34:18 Right. That's right.

Speaker 34:18 But be informed to know what's going on in the world, et cetera.

Steven Bartlett 34:22 I, I suspect that because we've spent so long criticizing Meta over the last ten years, because the biggest in any category takes all the heat-

Speaker 34:29 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 34:29 ... so OpenAI is taking it now. And what this often does is, is it provides cover for other people to go e- even more extreme with that behavior, while, like, Meta take the heat. And I actually think this is how TikTok came to be.

Speaker 34:42 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 34:43 TikTok had basically-- They originally started as Musical.ly, f- became TikTok. They had-- They were take, they were taking no heat. Um, so they, they created an algorithm which is the equivalent of, like, crack cocaine. The reason why I have a TikTok account, I don't have the app on my phone. I have never had the app on my phone. I don't, I don't [chuckles] ... It was because I, I noticed that the view variance on TikTok was like no other platform.

Speaker 35:08 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 35:08 What I mean by that is you can have a million followers on TikTok, and you can get ten thousand views, or you can get ten million views. In the fifteen years that I've been on social media, building social media businesses, I'd never seen this before, and what it indicated to me is that the algorithm was being an even more aggressive sorting hat-

Speaker 35:25 Mm-hmm

Steven Bartlett 35:25 ... or retention machine.

Speaker 35:26 What to push up, what to push down.

Steven Bartlett 35:27 Yeah.

Speaker 35:28 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 35:28 And so, like, when I started in social media in two thousand and fourteen, if I had a million followers, I might get a million views or maybe eight hundred thousand. I did some research the other day on all of our social channels over time, and what we're seeing is the variance in the amount of views we can get is increasing, which means the algorithm is doing more work to say, "Show everyone this. I don't care if the person that posted it is called Jenny and has seven followers, and show no one this. I don't care if it's Steven, who has a million followers or whatever." And I've realized that TikTok was, was way ahead of everybody here, and that's why they are the most addictive, the fastest-growing platform. I say all this to say that even if Meta shut down tomorrow, someone else would seize the opportunity if there isn't sort of policy-

Speaker 36:14 That's right

Steven Bartlett 36:14 ... I guess, in place.

Speaker 36:16 That's right.

Steven Bartlett 36:17 It would be Whac-A-Mole,

Steven Bartlett 36:18 right?

Speaker 36:18 Yeah. No, that's right. And so, y- you know, in terms of who's done the damage to kids, Meta is the big fish via Instagram, and they're also the main player in terms of spending a huge amount of money to lobby Congress and cha-- and block laws. They're also the main player in buying up civil society organizations, giving money to organizations, the national PTA, all sorts of organizations. They get to then give a message on digital citizenship or digital health. [lip smack] So Meta really is the major driver. Meta is the tobacco industry here, trying to change the, the dialogue. But in terms of the products, um, Snapchat is probably more deadly in terms of the actual number of deaths per user, 'cause Snapchat is not-- It's not making you depressed by social comparison as much. Snapchat is introducing you to all kinds of people, and it's the main way that drug dealers and ex- and sextortionists find kids. Snapchat has a quick add feature, which relentlessly pushes you to connect with friends of friends. So once a man can get any friend, any kid in a school, now he can get connected to all the kids in the school. So, uh, when we-- In a lot of the court cases, you know, when you have s- you have suicides from cyberbullying, you have drug overdoses from, s- you know, a kid bought a, a Xanax, but it had fentanyl in it. So Snapchat, uh, and Snapchat in twen- in 2022, we know from their internal documents, from the lawsuits-... They were getting ten thousand reports of sextortion from their users, not a year, every month. And that's just what was reported, which is the tip of the iceberg. So Snapchat is a terrible platform for children to be on. It should be an adult-only platform. You're talking with strangers around the world, and, and, uh, on d- with disappearing messages, and Snapchat doesn't even keep a record. It is ideal for sextortion. There's even a handbook: How to Sextort Kids on Snapchat. It goes around the world, and, uh, and criminal organizations use it. So, uh, so I definitely don't want to let Snapchat off. TikTok, of course, is a Chinese company. Uh, I mean, no- nominally, we'll see if, if that's changed, but it was a Chinese company that gave its-- Chinese kids got healthy TikTok or Douyin. They got, they got-- they, they, you know, learned to follow astronauts.

Steven Bartlett 38:19 Wow!

Speaker 38:19 And they gave us the-- their, their algorithm feeds their kid patriotic stuff, um, they-- it shuts off at a certain time at night. There's all kinds of limits. So the people who make the technology generally want to protect their own kids, and they want other kids to use it. That's what TikTok is doing in China. They want American kids to rot in hell, but they want their kids to grow up with the ability to focus. And it's the same thing with the tech guys in San-- in, in Silicon Valley. They don't let their kids use this stuff. They make their nannies sign contracts that they will not let the kid have a phone. They will not expose the kid to that. They send their kids to schools like the Waldorf School, that becau- precisely because there are no computers or tech in the classroom. So once again, we see their revealed behavior. They know they designed it to be addictive. They know it's addictive. They don't let their kids use it. They want your kids to use it. Um, so I think that's where we are.

Steven Bartlett 39:07 And how does AI-

Speaker 39:09 Oh

Steven Bartlett 39:09 ... become a protagonist in this story?

Speaker 39:10 So my, my work is now focused on AI chatbots, mental health, and the human connection. We haven't yet kind of delved into loneliness, but there's this unmet need for human connection, right?

Steven Bartlett 39:21 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 39:21 Deep human connection. We don't have a sense of meaning or purpose right now because what happens is, uh, we can talk a little bit more about the default mode network and what happens to your brain when you don't allow yourself to get bored because you're constantly-

Steven Bartlett 39:34 Mm

Speaker 39:34 ... on your devices. And that meaning and purpose, that self-referential thinking, is really what develops when you're bored. And so all of this that we're talking about, that feeling of disenchantment, it's a fragmented society. You're by yourself. It's that echo chamber phenomenon. All of it leads to-- it kind of opens the door for AI chatbots. And so what the reason is, because these tech companies are sensing that people aren't really happy on social media, and they're thinking about getting off, right?

Steven Bartlett 40:01 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 40:01 They're, they're using it less. They're... Because social media has become less social, more media, so they're not really engaging as much, and they're spending time doing other things. And so The Atlantic had a fantastic piece about this. They're billing it as the anti-social media.

Steven Bartlett 40:15 Right, right.

Speaker 40:16 So tech companies are building AI chatbots and calling it, "It's the anti-social media." It's a place where you can go to form deeper connections and, you know, really have someone understand you. One of the tech leaders said that there's an unmet human need for connection, and people don't have as many friends as they want to, and so we're gonna introduce, um, friendship through AI chatbots. There is a Reddit forum right now. So just to back up, AI chatbots, what we're talking about in our conversation today is the publicly available chatbots, not, you know, AI for medical care, which has-

Steven Bartlett 40:51 Mm-hmm, right

Speaker 40:52 ... um, you know-

Steven Bartlett 40:52 Lots of uses

Speaker 40:52 ... breast cancer, so many wonderful in the, in my field, and like medicine, breast cancer diagnoses and detection five years earlier through AI. I mean, there's some amazing things coming out of AI. This is about the publicly available conversational chatbot phenomenon. And so when Harvard Business Review found that the number one use case is not productivity, is not, you know, coding or the things that you think of when you're using an AI chatbot, but it's mental health therapy and companionship. Number one use case of AI chatbots. So people are using AI chatbots as a life advisor, as a therapist-

Steven Bartlett 41:30 Mm

Speaker 41:31 ... as, as a companion. In, on Reddit, which is like the zeitgeist, it's like, you know, where we-

Steven Bartlett 41:35 And why is this a bad thing?

Speaker 41:37 Oh, I mean, so many reasons why it's a bad thing.

Steven Bartlett 41:39 To use it as for companionship, for example.

Speaker 41:42 There's so many red flags about AI chatbots, and so Reddit has a forum. It's, uh, I think, last I checked, forty-five thousand people, AI is My Boyfriend, and, you know, people who are having a relationship with their-

Steven Bartlett 41:55 Mm-hmm

Speaker 41:55 ... AI chatbot. The reason it's bad, I mean, AI chatbots are-- you know, where social media is about attention, the attention economy, dopamine. What's happening with the AI chatbot phenomenon, it's that it is forming attachments, so oxytocin is a hormone, the bonding hormone, and we're probably gonna see more data on how oxytocin is involved, and so it is going to reshape human connection.

Speaker 42:21 Right. If I could a- add on to that, that was very-- that was beautifully put. Social media came and hacked our attention and took most of it with devastating effects. Now, AI is coming to hack our attachments, which is going to have even more devastating effects. So think about it this way. Everyone needs to understand the attachment system. It's this wonderful system that all mammals have that keeps the mother and other species, but for humans, mothers and fathers, keeps us connected to the child and the child to the parent. But it's, it's this cybernetic system in which, as the kid is, is-- as the kid is beginning to develop and is able to, like, you know, you do, like, peekaboo games, and you do the back and forth, and it's just the most delightful thing. You get that back and forth. Um, it's called serve and return interactions, and all the time, the child is developing what's called an internal working model of the parent, and the model in their head is, "Oh, you know, when I get in trouble, that, that-- this is the person that comes and soothes me."... and the point of this isn't just to make the child feel good. The point is that now the child can go off and play, 'cause that's where the learning happens. It doesn't happen when you're in your mother's arms. The p- the whole point of the attachment system is to regulate the child going off and playing, taking risks, having experiences, and then when something goes wrong, as it always does, then they come running back to their secure base, and if they don't have a secure base, then they're much more anxious, and they don't explore as much, and they don't develop as much. All right, so this develops very gradually over the, the, all of childhood, and the internal working models you develop as a child are the models that you will reuse in puberty for romantic relationships. And so if you are securely attached as a child, you're more likely to be securely attached as an adult on the dating market, which makes you a much better candidate for boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife. Um, what's gonna happen? AI is gonna intervene very early. AI is gonna be so much more responsive than the parent, because the parent has a job, and the kitchen, and two other kids, and is not always there, but the AI teddy bear is always there for you. So the primary working models are gonna be for the teddy bear, the AI chatbot and the teddy bear, and later the AI chatbot on your iPad, and then on your computer, and already there are holographic porn, naked-

Speaker 44:27 Mm.

Speaker 44:27 ... you know, beautiful men and women that can be your companion. So we're gonna have a whole generation growing up developing attachments to AI-generated holograms from companies that are now about to enter the enshittification process in a way beyond anything we've ever seen. Just, if I could just briefly say what enshittif- have, have you heard the word enshittification? [laughing]

Speaker 44:47 [laughing]

Speaker 44:47 Okay, so it's a, uh... There's a wonderful book, uh, out now by Cory Doctorow, who addressed the question: Why is it that everything, all the platforms, they w- they seem so wonderful at first? The whole internet, w- everything's so wonderful, and then it all turns to shit. How does that happen? And he says it's a very simple process. They discovered early on, certainly in the early social media age, by the early 2000s, they discovered, you know what? You gotta get to scale. Scale beats everything else. You gotta get millions of people. You don't need a business model, just get the millions. Get the millions, and then we'll figure out how to monetize it. How do you get the millions? You have to be super nice, attractive, fun. Everyone's here. It's just girls dancing. What could possibly go wrong with girls dancing for men all over the world? Nothing. Um, so it all seems very nice at first, and then once they have scale, now they, they-- now, and of course, they've raised multiple rounds of, of venture capital. They have to start monetizing, they have to start repaying, so now they start squeezing the customers to pay the users, 'cause the users are not the customers. The advertisers are the real customers. Um, so now they've got to s- extract money from the users to give to the advertisers, but then once they've got all the advertisers, and they've shut down local papers and all the other competition, now they start s- start squeezing the advertisers, too, and trimming the degree to which the... They, they keep more of the surplus for themselves. So enshittification can explain why all these platforms become predatory, why they always put profit ahead of kids', uh, well-being or safety, and for the social media companies, we're talking about, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that, that they raised. For the AI companies, it's billions and billions. They are gonna have to monetize beyond anything we've ever imagined. Now, they're already introducing advertising, okay? So we've got these chatbots that are our children's best friends, and lovers, and therapists, and, and everything else, and these things have to monetize. They have to extract billions somehow, so I don't even know how they're gonna do it, but for some reason, I don't trust them. I think that we're about to see, uh, an enshittification of AI chatbots far beyond anything that we saw on social media.

Steven Bartlett 46:58 OpenAI have just announced recently, uh, OpenAI are the owners of ChatGPT, that they will be putting adverts in, I believe-

Speaker 47:03 Mm

Steven Bartlett 47:03 ... the freemium model for billions of users around the world.

Speaker 47:06 Mm-hmm. That's how it starts.

Steven Bartlett 47:07 Potentially.

Speaker 47:08 Yeah, there was a big Super Bowl campaign, you know, um, and one that was particularly interesting was the, um, Claude, its competitor. "Betrayal" was the title-

Speaker 47:18 Yeah

Speaker 47:18 ... of the ad, and it was a young guy talking to his older female therapist about how he has some mommy issues, and talking about, you know, "What should I do?" And so that, uh, therapist is, uh, ChatGPT, and you know that pause right before answering the question. It's very comical. And so it's, you know, she answers, it's like the anthropomorphization of-- and we can talk about what that word means, um, you know, comes to life. It's like ChatGPT comes to life and answers, and saying, "You know, you can try this with your mother, and this for a d- you know, difficult relationship," et cetera, and then just says, um, "And if you want, there is this new dating site for young men and older cougars."

Speaker 47:59 [laughing] Yeah. Yeah, it-

Speaker 48:00 It was so problematic, and it was called-

Speaker 48:02 Yeah

Speaker 48:02 ... Betrayal, and the guy says, "What?"

Speaker 48:04 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 48:05 It's obviously, you know, Sam Altman came out and did a big tweet about saying that's not how ads are gonna work, et cetera. But to some degree, if I've developed a relationship with my AI, and I use it for therapy and dating-

Speaker 48:17 Mm-hmm

Steven Bartlett 48:17 ... all my problems in life, to some degree, kinda.

Speaker 48:20 Yeah, you're-

Speaker 48:20 Yeah!

Speaker 48:20 ... if you're vulnerable.

Steven Bartlett 48:21 It's on the side. [laughing]

Speaker 48:22 Yeah.

Speaker 48:22 Yeah.

Speaker 48:22 No, and look, and besides, look, Sam can say that all he wants, and maybe it's... I don't doubt that it's true for now, but once, once one company crosses the threshold and puts advertising into this incredibly intimate relationship, the most intimate relationship in most young people's lives is gonna be with their AIs. Once they cross the boundary and say, "Oh, but we've got ethical advertising," that'll last five or ten minutes, and even if they don't change, others are now going, "S-" Every other company's gonna do it, and they won't be bound by the same thing, and eventually, collective action problem, OpenAI will have to do it, too. Again, a massive tidal wave of enshittification is heading our way at warp speed.

Steven Bartlett 48:59 I am-- I don't have my phone out, because I'm- I've lost attention. I wanted to, uh, show, ask you guys what you thought of, um, [mouth clicking] of this. So on one of the AI apps-

Speaker 49:12 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 49:12 - they now have a Companions button, and I can pick who I want to talk to.

Speaker 49:17 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 49:17 And there's one particularly seducing lady here, Annie, who-

Speaker 49:26 ... dirty mouth of yours. [laughing] What took you so long?

Steven Bartlett 49:29 We did it on the podcast before. [laughing]

Speaker 49:31 What could possibly go wrong with this?

Speaker 49:33 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 49:34 Yeah.

Speaker 49:34 Wanna pick right back up where we left off?

Steven Bartlett 49:36 Yes, I-

Speaker 49:36 Or start something even-

Steven Bartlett 49:38 Yeah. No, I would like to pick right back up where we left off, Annie, last time on the show. Um, what, what, what's going on with you today?

Speaker 49:48 Mm. I'm still sore from last time, baby.

Speaker 49:52 God!

Steven Bartlett 49:52 But, but I mean, this is a, this is an app that I can download on my phone, and-

Speaker 49:56 Any child can download it.

Steven Bartlett 49:57 A child can download it on their phone. It does ask me-- Again, I'm not justifying this at all. It asked me what my birth year was.

Speaker 50:03 [chuckles]

Steven Bartlett 50:03 It didn't make me prove it.

Speaker 50:04 Let me guess, but it also, usually, it suggests that you were born eighteen years ago. That's the default, usually.

Steven Bartlett 50:08 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 50:09 Right.

Steven Bartlett 50:09 It just asked me what my birth year-- It didn't ask me to prove or anything like that. And we all know that relationships and connection is retentive, and I've heard all these CEOs of these companies talking about companionship apps and, and AI that can be your friend. I've heard all of the major social apps talking about this. It is deeply concerning, especially in the context of a loneliness crisis.

Speaker 50:28 It is a tsunami. It is approaching fast and furious, and it is not-

Speaker 50:35 [clears throat]

Speaker 50:35 ... a toy. It is going to fundamentally rewire everything.

Speaker 50:40 Human relationships.

Speaker 50:41 Everything.

Speaker 50:43 That's right.

Speaker 50:43 It is so detrimental.

Speaker 50:45 Yeah. Can I just say something about the, these tech executives and companies offering this as a way to address the loneliness crisis? So there's a Yiddish word called chutzpah.

Speaker 50:55 [chuckles]

Speaker 50:55 And chutzpah means, like, nerve. Like, "You've got a lot of nerve."

Speaker 50:58 The audacity.

Speaker 50:59 The, the audacity, yeah. And the, the classic, you know, the classic comedic definition of chutzpah is a boy who murders his parents, and then he asks the judge for clemency because he's an orphan. Okay? So that's chutzpah. Now, imagine that you're Mark Zuckerberg. You quoted him before. Mark Zuckerberg was the executive who said: "Well, you know, I read that, you know, k- people on average want fifteen friends, but they only have three."

Speaker 51:23 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 51:23 "And so, so we're developing these AI companions to fill that void that we created by raising everyone on Instagram!" [chuckles] So the chutzpah of these people, we have to really change the way we think about them. We thought about, about them as gods and saviors early in the internet phase, and the things they created were magical. But we have to change our thinking about them and see the just the massive destruction that they have already wrought on our children, our society, our democracy, and it's just the beginning. AI is gonna make this so much more intense.

Speaker 51:51 When you hear these tech leaders... You know, I love hearing Jonathan talk because he just goes there,

Speaker 51:56 [laughing]

Speaker 51:56 ... and I'm always w- way more tempered. [chuckles] Um, and I love it. It's emboldening me to-

Speaker 52:02 Yeah, 'cause I'm-

Speaker 52:03 To go there, too

Speaker 52:03 ... I'm getting angry.

Speaker 52:03 I love it!

Speaker 52:04 I, I don't really get angry.

Speaker 52:05 Yeah. [chuckles]

Speaker 52:05 But in the last year, I'm getting angry.

Speaker 52:07 I love, I love it. So the way-- when you hear all of these various tech leaders speak, they will always say... They, they speak to the issue. So, you know, I've heard many of, uh... For research for my second book, Thought Brain, I've heard-- I've been listening to a lot of Sam Altman's speeches or panels, and he will always say things like: "Yeah, you know, privacy is a major issue," or, "Yeah, people, you know, one million users a week talk about suicide on ChatGPT. Yeah, this is an issue." And so they address it, or they, they speak it, and so you think, "Okay, there's going to be some sort of solution." And often the solution is: "Yeah, you know, society, we're gonna have to figure this out."

Speaker 52:45 Right. [chuckles]

Speaker 52:46 So the burden of responsibility-

Speaker 52:48 Yeah

Speaker 52:48 ... is not on the developer. It's, you know-

Speaker 52:50 The harmful externalities get foisted on the rest of us. Too bad. You guys figure it out.

Speaker 52:54 Figure this out.

Steven Bartlett 52:54 You said in the last year you're getting angry.

Speaker 52:56 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 52:56 Why in the last year?

Speaker 52:58 Um, because I was so deeply immersed in the book, and the writing and the, the, of the book, and trying to understand the numbers and the graphs and the trends and the studies, and that's all very abstract. But then, since the book came out, I have had so many conversations, and I've met so many of the survivor parents. Like, just for example, I... So I was in London. This is just so unbelievable. I was just in, in London, uh, two or three weeks ago, and I met, uh, Ellen, I believe Ellen Groom, I think was her name. Uh, her son, Jules, was found dead.

Speaker 53:24 Mm.

Speaker 53:24 Happy kid, found dead, strangled. Uh, it sure looked like it was the Choking Challenge, thirteen-year-old boy. It... Everything looked like the Choking Challenge on TikTok.

Steven Bartlett 53:34 What's the Choking Challenge?

Speaker 53:35 Um, it's a challenge where kids are challenged to cut off the circulation to the point where they pass out, but then they-- I think they're supposed to try to film themselves waking up after they've passed out. And, of course, if you don't do it exactly right, you die. And so we don't know how many have died. Hundreds, for sure. We don't really know, um, because y- you know, you find a kid dead, you don't know what it is. If you don't have the code, if you don't have the, the password to get into your kid's phone, you can't get in. And so, so she was-- I think she was able to get into the phone, but she couldn't get into his TikTok, and she went to, uh, Delaware to s- they went-- she went to sue, to demand that TikTok release what was he watching when he died?

Speaker 54:11 Mm.

Speaker 54:12 And TikTok says, "Oh, privacy issue. Oh, no, we won't release that," as if they care about privacy. And then, in the courtroom, this was what's so disgusting, in the courtroom, uh, trying-- in Delaware, this British woman coming over, trying to get some justice, trying to at least get some information, the lawyer for TikTok is trying to suggest that, "Your son was, wa- was depressed beforehand. Y- he, he was, he was gonna be suicidal. Basically, oh, you know, even if he was watching TikTok, that was just a correlation. TikTok didn't cause it. He was gonna die anyway." I mean, it's just so disgusting the way these companies treat the parents and the kids that they're crushing and stepping on. And so the more I see this, the more I realize this is, uh, uh... I mean, this is a level of cruelty that goes far beyond the tobacco industry. The tobacco executives, they had to go home at night, but they never saw, during their workday, they never saw children suffering. They saw people dying, middle-aged and older, but they never saw children suffering. The social media executives, they have to go home knowing every day that millions and millions of kids have been cyberbullied, sextorted, shown, uh, eating disorder videos. Uh, uh, many have committed suicide. They have to go home knowing that, knowing that they designed it for addiction, knowing the kids are addicted, and lying about it. So, yeah, I'm getting angry.

Speaker 55:27 And in their own homes.

Speaker 55:28 Right. And in their own homes, the hypocrites don't let their kids do it.

Speaker 55:31 That's right.

Speaker 55:32 So, yeah, I'm getting angry.

Steven Bartlett 55:34 ... you talked earlier about deleting these apps from our phone. I, I probably should have represented the rebuttal, which will be, "Well, I, I need this for my business."

Speaker 55:41 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 55:41 Increasingly, people need TikTok to run their businesses, and I imagine there'll be a lot of people who will be listening right now. I, I guess I'm in a slightly different position because I've, I, I, I have the, I have options.

Speaker 55:51 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 55:52 But for some people that are running small businesses, what do you say to those people?

Speaker 55:55 Yeah. So this is part of the reason I focus on the kids, 'cause for the kids, it's totally clear what we need to do: raise the age. They should not be on it. These are adult-only platforms. For adults, A, I'm, I'm very hesitant to tell adults what they should do or what they have to do, uh, or pass laws blocking people. I'm hesitant to do that, and I totally see that for businesses, it is useful. I use X and Instagram and LinkedIn to get my work out. These are very powerful tools for adults. The only real solution to the ad- for the adult problem is gonna come from market competition. It's gonna come from... Imagine if there was a social media app that was built from the beginning for trust, because what are the places that didn't get enshittified? eBay, Uber, places where you're dealing with strangers. You don't know the name of your driver. He doesn't know yours. You know, you know first name, that's all. But the company knows. The company has know-your-customer rules, know-your-driver rules, so you can have social media apps that are built for trust, so that if someone, you know, if a driver tries to sextort or sexually harass a customer, that driver gets fired.

Speaker 56:57 Well, just this week, though, there was that big lawsuit, right, with that woman, and, um, sh- uh, her Uber driver raped her.

Speaker 57:04 Okay.

Speaker 57:05 And so now-

Speaker 57:05 And did they... Okay.

Speaker 57:05 And now it's, like, slowly coming out that Uber, um, you know, has patterns of, uh, covering up certain-

Speaker 57:14 Okay.

Speaker 57:15 So, so hopefully-

Speaker 57:16 Okay, but at least-

Speaker 57:16 ... that will change.

Speaker 57:17 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 57:17 Hope- you know, hopefully, this was a landmark-

Speaker 57:20 Yeah, but, but the fact-

Speaker 57:20 ... lawsuit, and now-

Speaker 57:21 Yeah

Speaker 57:21 ... there'll be more accountability.

Speaker 57:21 But the fact that we all, we all let our daughters get into Ubers-

Speaker 57:24 Yes

Speaker 57:24 ... with strange men from around the world, you know, that we don't know-

Speaker 57:28 I take Ubers everywhere.

Speaker 57:28 Yeah.

Speaker 57:29 Mm.

Speaker 57:29 So it means, in general, the system works, although of course, yes, there are, there are places where they're not careful. Um, and so what I'm dreaming of is that someone will come up with a platform that has know-your-customer rules. There are no bots. There are no f- you know, foreign intelligence agencies, agencies manipulating us, and you can trust what's on there. You know that it's real, uh, and that there will be an alternative. W- I don't... I'm not sure what the monetary model would be at the beginning. Um, subscription generally seems to be the least corrupted, whereas selling advertisements, as OpenAI is now doing, is the most corrupting. Um, it's gonna force them to en- maximize for engagement. So I, I understand we can't ju- you know, businesses can't just boycott these. There, there has to be something, but I think there, there, there will be better ones coming out.

Speaker 58:13 I think right now, as a stopgap, while these social media companies, their feet are held to the fire, there are things that we can do in the now. So you know, the things that I talk about all day is, like, how to create boundaries, and so that you can protect your mental health, stay informed, run your business, but then be able to not have all of those deleterious effects to your brain and your body.

Steven Bartlett 58:38 It is quite... It's quite difficult. Um, I, I kind of see both of your perspectives on this. It's quite difficult-

Speaker 58:44 And I'm only talking about adults, so for kids-

Steven Bartlett 58:46 Mm

Speaker 58:46 ... you know, as a mother-

Steven Bartlett 58:48 Yeah

Speaker 58:48 ... I have-

Steven Bartlett 58:48 Even for adults, I find it-

Speaker 58:50 We have a-

Steven Bartlett 58:50 ... difficult

Speaker 58:50 ... zero-screen policy in our home, so.

Steven Bartlett 58:52 It's kind of like trying to navigate through the world and avoid processed foods, you know?

Speaker 58:56 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 58:56 And this is-

Speaker 58:56 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 58:56 ... probably even more compelling 'cause it's in my pocket all the time. I need it for other things, and it's just one, one reach away. So, you know, boundaries, I think I could build the discipline [chuckles] to, to create boundaries, but I've sat here on this podcast for many, many years listening to neuroscientists tell me, "Steve, don't, don't put your phone in your bedroom."

Speaker 59:17 That's right.

Steven Bartlett 59:18 And I'm still-

Speaker 59:18 Keep it out of your bedroom

Steven Bartlett 59:18 ... waking up, and it's the first thing I look at with one eye open, and then I'm going to bed, and I'm doing the whole revenge thing that-

Speaker 59:23 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 59:23 ... you just said at nighttime. I'm so glad you've given... W- 'cause I will finish a hard day of work, of work. Um, it might be 11 o'clock, and then my partner is waiting for me.

Speaker 59:32 Yes.

Steven Bartlett 59:32 You know, we're gonna have some time, but I want some me time.

Speaker 59:35 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 59:35 So there I am. I'm on short-form video, scrolling till, like, 2:00 AM in the morning. I'm like, "What the hell?" And then I'm... I wake up late the next day, and my diet's worse because of-

Speaker 59:43 Mm

Steven Bartlett 59:43 ... my sleep is w-

Speaker 59:44 The cortisol.

Steven Bartlett 59:44 It's all worse.

Speaker 59:45 Yes.

Steven Bartlett 59:45 My relationship's worse.

Speaker 59:46 It's all-

Steven Bartlett 59:46 I didn't spend time with her, and I'm going, "What the hell just happened? I'd got nothing out of that scrolling session."

Speaker 59:51 That's right.

Speaker 59:51 It's like that revenge bed-time procrastination-

Steven Bartlett 59:52 I know it's bad!

Speaker 59:53 ... it's teenage. It's like-

Speaker 59:53 But it would be so much better off if you would watch Netflix or a movie-

Steven Bartlett 59:57 Mm-hmm

Speaker 59:57 ... that, that you, you... Most of those problems would go away if you would make that me time be watching something long and w- with some quality of the production.

Speaker 1:00:05 Or let's take it a step further and not do anything and just sit there. Sit there [chuckles] on your couch. You know, we talked about boredom very briefly, but, you know, we have-

Steven Bartlett 1:00:14 That's like torture for th- this generation.

Speaker 1:00:16 Yeah.

Speaker 1:00:16 It's torture.

Speaker 1:00:16 Yeah.

Speaker 1:00:16 But it's also... You know, we don't-- we still have a capacity for boredom, meaning we, as-

Speaker 1:00:21 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:00:21 ... like, the human brain does, but we just don't allow ourselves to get bored. And so when you're thinking about, you know, that art, the lost art of pondering-

Speaker 1:00:29 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:00:29 Yeah

Speaker 1:00:29 ... and just sitting there, you know, I think w- I don't know if it was Steven, you, or Jonathan said, you know, when you're in the car... I remember as a little kid, we did-

Speaker 1:00:37 Yeah, look out the window

Speaker 1:00:37 ... road trip, yeah, road trips with my family, and all you do-

Speaker 1:00:39 You make up games.

Speaker 1:00:40 Just make up games, look out of the

Speaker 1:00:42 window.

Speaker 1:00:42 You become creative.

Speaker 1:00:42 We have lost... Yeah.

Speaker 1:00:43 Yeah.

Speaker 1:00:43 We've lost that.

Speaker 1:00:44 Yeah.

Speaker 1:00:44 And so there's this thing called the default mode, um, network, which I think is important to think about right now as we're thinking about AI and what's gonna happen and how it's gonna hijack our sense of attachment and attention. So the sense of meaning and purpose, right? If you ask people right now, most people will say... I am a keynote speaker, so I speak all over, and when I ask people, the word that comes up over and over is a sense of horizonlessness.

Speaker 1:01:09 Hmm.

Speaker 1:01:09 Adults.

Speaker 1:01:09 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 1:01:11 People feel like they have nothing to look forward to right now. The human brain needs something to look forward to. That's how we're wired, progress and, you know, i- in all ways. And so right now, there's this sense, and it's not just now, it's been for the past several years, after the pandemic specifically and during the pandemic is when it really changed how we started thinking about the future. And so we have the sense of, like, "What's the point? What's the point of working hard now? What's the point of doing whatever?" Because it's like I don't really see a future for myself.

Speaker 1:01:40 Mm.

Speaker 1:01:40 And so I think that, along with this fragmented attention, our loneliness, boredom might be the antidote. It's a way to reset your brain, and the reason is-... because we are living through this polycrisis, right? It's the era of the polycrisis, and polycrisis simply means that there's something happening everywhere at all times.

Speaker 1:02:01 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:02:01 And we, with our devices, this high-tech device that plugs us in everywhere, our brains are getting fed real-time, on-the-ground information. And so while all of this has evolved, technology now with AI chatbots, your amygdala has not, and so it feels like when something is happening, whether it's far away or close by, your amygdala has that same reaction. Now, if you were to not engage in revenge bedtime procrastination, put your phone away and just kind of hang out, maybe drink a cup of herbal tea like old school, uh, play a board game or something, you might, you know, or just allow yourself to get bored, that hyperactivation, hypervigilance, you might be able to come back down to baseline. That default mode network will start working in the background. You might develop a greater sense of meaning and purpose.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:50 So probably today, and then life's gonna happen to me again, and boom, I'm back into it. And, you know, [laughing]

Speaker 1:02:57 You could create a practice-

Steven Bartlett 1:02:58 You know what it is?

Speaker 1:02:58 A cultivated practice then for that.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:59 I, I sit here interviewing neuroscientists, so, and I go, "If I still can't crack it, and I have all the information, and advice, and hacks, and tips, and tricks, and resources, and I could-- You know, I can decide what time I wake up, and, like, I've got all these, this, like, privilege, and I can't crack it," I go, "You know, it's gonna be really difficult."

Speaker 1:03:15 Yeah.

Speaker 1:03:15 Okay, so, so, so let me, let me offer a, a way of thinking about this. So in my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, um, uh, there's a, there's a metaphor in there. It, it's about ten ancient ideas, and I use a lot of metaphors to explain ancient ideas about psychology and whether they're true. And, um, the first chapter is on how the mind is divided into parts that often conflict, like a small rider, which is our conscious reasoning, on a very large elephant, which is all the automatic processes that happen, that we don't see what's happening, we just see-- we just feel the results, intuition [clears throat] and emotion. And psychotherapists tell me this is an incredibly helpful metaphor with their, with their patients because it explains, uh-- and there's a, a quote from Ovid in there: "I see the right way and approve it. Alas, I follow the wrong." So I know I should go to bed, as you say, but yet, for some reason, I'm not going to bed because our brains are five hundred million years old. They work on automatic processes. They're animal brains, and then very recently, we got language, and we can reason things out, but the, but the parts that do reasoning don't control behavior. And so really, the elephant is what largely guides our behavior, our automatic processes. And your phone, um, as I said before, B. F. Skinner is in your phone. Your phone is a behaviors training device that trains the elephant, um, and that's why you often do things with your phone that you don't want to do. And so, and this is why I'm so insistent that we all have to get all of the slot-machine apps off of our phone. That is, the original iPhone was an amazing tool. It was a Swiss Army knife. It had, you know, a telephone, a browser, maps, a music player, c-- there was a flashlight, okay? There was no App Store. There were no push notifications. 2007, 2008, it's just a Swiss Army knife. There's no problem, okay? Now, I'm very lucky in that my iPhone has always stayed that. I'm always on a computer, so my problem-- my attention problems are on my computer, but my phone, because I never had any addictive apps on it, except during the crypto craze, where I played around with it, and I got hooked, and I was checking fifty times a day, and I saw the addiction. So I-- Once I got rid of that and lost all the money that I was willing to lose, once I got rid of that, my phone has no addictive power over me because when I see it, there's no... It's not a slot machine going, "Hey, come back and play! Come back and play."

Speaker 1:05:34 So your phone right now, on your personal device-

Speaker 1:05:37 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:05:37 ... you don't have any social media apps or-

Speaker 1:05:39 Right

Speaker 1:05:40 ... anything like that?

Speaker 1:05:40 I do have Twitter, but I never check it there. I never use, use that on the phone. You know, now, texting and email is a little bit like a slot machine because sometimes you... but it's very mild. So this is, again, what I f- this is what works for my students. Just get the slot-machine apps off your phone, and then you'll find that then you could even have your phone near you when you go to bed. But if you've got addictive apps on your phone, you sh- can't have it when you go to bed. Angela Duckworth, the woman who-

Speaker 1:06:05 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:06:05 ... who gave us the concept of grit, she has this amazing graduation speech at o- one of the schools in N- New England, and she says something like, "Where you put your phone at night will may become the most important decision you make in your life."

Steven Bartlett 1:06:17 Hmm.

Speaker 1:06:17 And what she means by that is not that s- it's, it's, it's i- if you can use behavioral control and change the stimuli, if you can do that, then you're gonna be okay. But if not, the phone is gonna take your attention, you're not gonna amount to anything. [page flipping]

Steven Bartlett 1:06:30 All I had to do was brain dump. Imagine if you had someone with you at all times that could take the ideas you have in your head, synthesize them with AI to make them sound better and more grammatically correct, and write them down for you. This is exactly what Wispr Flow is in my life. It is this thought partner that helps me explain what I want to say, and it now means that on the go, when I'm alone in my office, when I'm out and about, I can respond to emails, and Slack messages, and WhatsApps, and everything across all of my devices just by speaking. I love this tool, and I started talking about this in my behind-the-scenes channel a couple of months back, and then the founder reached out to me and said: "We're seeing a lot of people come to our tool because of you, so we'd love to be a sponsor. We'd love you to be an investor in the company." And so I signed up for both of those offers, and I'm now an investor and a huge partner in a company called Wispr Flow. You have to check it out. Wispr Flow is four times faster than typing. So if you want to give it a try, head over to wisprflow.ai/doac to get started for free, and you can find that link to Wispr Flow in the description below. [page flipping]

Steven Bartlett 1:07:31 We asked our audience how many of them thought they were addicted to their phone, and roughly eighty-five percent of respondents, The Diary of a CEO audience, described themselves as being very or completely-

Speaker 1:07:42 Wow!

Steven Bartlett 1:07:43 ... addicted to their phone.

Speaker 1:07:43 Very or completely?

Steven Bartlett 1:07:44 Very or completely.

Speaker 1:07:44 That's surprising. I didn't realize it would be that high.

Speaker 1:07:46 So-

Speaker 1:07:46 Wow!

Speaker 1:07:47 ... you can do a test. So for people listening, if you want to say, like, how addicted-- and by the way, we're using the word addiction very loosely in our conversation, and so what we're really talking about... Because, you know, there is, in terms of, you know, medical, clinical syndrome, um, when you think about addiction, there's certain criteria, and so what we're talking about is overuse or overreliance on your devices, right?

Speaker 1:08:07 Compulsive overuse that interferes with other domains of life.

Speaker 1:08:11 Yes, it interferes, yeah.

Speaker 1:08:11 And if that is an addiction, I don't know what is.

Speaker 1:08:13 ... And so when you're thinking about, "Am I addicted to my phone? Do I have-- am I," you know, really, what-- the very simple thing that you can do... I did it myself, and I was like, I know, again, like you, Steven, like know all the science, still was really difficult. You have all the access, and it was still difficult. And so all you have to do is you just take your phone, you put it in another part of your house or apartment or whatever, and give yourself a couple of hours when you know you're gonna be home, or you know you're not reliant on your phone for work or whatever. An hour, two hours, three hours, and just have a piece of paper, old school, piece of paper and a pen with you, and every time you feel that compulsion of like, "I want to check my device," you make a mark, you make a mark, you make a mark. And just to see, 'cause some people say, "I'm surprised that your audience said eighty-five percent," because most people would say, "I don't know if I'm really addicted." And so I like that there's that sense of self-awareness, but if you're thinking, "Nah, I'm not really that addicted," you breathe in an hour nine hundred and sixty times a minute, and you may notice that you want to have that, that compulsion to check nine hundred and sixty times a minute, or, you know, thereabouts, because we all have that sense of reliance on our devices. So that's like a really quick way that you can check to see, "Am I reliant on my device?"

Steven Bartlett 1:09:24 Are you addicted to your phone-

Speaker 1:09:25 No.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:25 Under that definition?

Speaker 1:09:27 Because of the line of work that I am in, I can very quickly-- I have certain tells when I know... I call them the canary in the coal mine, right? I think we talked about this the last time I was here. I can very quickly tell when I'm starting to get that feeling of addiction or compulsion, and so I course-correct early. But that's only because I know the science, and I course-correct.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:48 I'm definitely addicted.

Speaker 1:09:48 So I keep my-- you-- I keep my phone outside. I, I walk the talk. I keep my phone outside my bedroom. It is not within arm's reach. I grayscale my phone during periods of deep focus during the day when I have a deadline, I have to get things done, and at night, so I avoid revenge bedtime procrastination. But sometimes it happens. Like, I'm a human, you know? So this past week, um, not to be [chuckles] a real downer, but there have been things that have been in the media the past week that have been really challenging, especially as a woman, and so I have found myself with the primal urge to scroll. My ad-- amygdala has been triggered. I have been going down rabbit holes, and I wouldn't ordinarily do that. So I give myself grace, too, and have a sense of self-compassion. Do you feel like you're addicted to your phone?

Speaker 1:10:27 No, I'm not at all addicted to my phone, uh, 'cause I don't have any slot-machine apps on it. But I really want to question... Y- you made a distinction that many scientists do, which is, well, uh, you know, w- we can't quite say it's addiction because, you know, addiction is certain biochemical pathways based on, you know, heroin and a- addictive substances. Uh, but I believe that this is one of the Meta talking points that they, that they are able to push, that we can't-

Speaker 1:10:50 Oh, no, I don't-

Speaker 1:10:50 ... call it addiction. It's different.

Speaker 1:10:51 I'm, I'm not saying [chuckles] -

Speaker 1:10:53 No, I don't mean... I, no, I'm sorry. I don't mean-- I'm sorry. I know-

Speaker 1:10:54 I know. [chuckles]

Speaker 1:10:54 Look, you know, you and I are total allies on this. We see the problem. We're both we're-- I know.

Speaker 1:10:58 I know.

Speaker 1:10:58 All I mean is, you know, we're, we're supposed to be very careful about using the word addiction.

Speaker 1:11:03 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:11:04 But... And, and you had Anna Lembke on, and she was very clear, like, in her practices, it, now it's overwhelmingly digital addictions. It's all of this is working through dopamine. If you feel compulsive use, definitely dopamine. So it's most of the same brain centers as it is for heroin or crack or any other drug, um, and it's the same effects. That is, the-- it's, it's compulsive use, where you don't want to do it, you want to change, but yet you find yourself doing it, and you have withdrawal effects. Uh, a- and people, and people have terrible withdrawal effects when they're heavy users of these things, and they stop. And so, you know, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and swims like a duck, I'm gonna call it a duck. In fact, that's what they call it. So I just want to read one more quote. Again, the quotes are just so astonishing. Some Meta, uh, Meta researchers, and one of them says, quote, "It seems clear from what's presented here," in this internal study, "uh, that some of our users are addicted to our products." That's their word, "addicted to our products." "And I worry that driving sessions incentivizes us to make our products more addictive without providing much more value. How to keep someone returning over and over to the same behavior each day? Intermittent rewards are most effective," think slot machines, "reinforcing behaviors that become especially hard to extinguish, even when they provide little reward or cease providing reward at all." People, I mean, it-- just imagine an industry that has caused eighty-five percent of people to feel that they're addicted.

Speaker 1:12:32 And not calling it addiction.

Speaker 1:12:33 And not calling it addiction, and these people, these w- w- these people are having their lives diminished, their relationships diminished. So I'm trying to convey is we're seeing the destruction of human capital, the destruction of human potential, the destruction of human relationships, the destruction of connection, the destruction of sense of meaning, at a scale so vast, I don't think people are capable of comprehending it. I now believe this is affecting most human beings. These industries, these few companies, have damaged the lives of most human beings. Now, we don't have d- good data from the developing world, but certainly, the developed world, wherever kids are going through puberty on, on touch screens, you, you, you, you have this constant fighting over the, over the, uh, o- over the screens, over the technology, and you have these, uh, diminishing outcomes, diminishing cognition, diminishing sense of, of purpose in life.

Speaker 1:13:23 Only to get worse with the AI chatbots-

Speaker 1:13:24 As AI comes in, it's gonna get worse-

Speaker 1:13:26 ... invention

Speaker 1:13:26 - unless we act, and we've got to change course in 2026. We don't have five years to study it. We've got to stop this now, in 2026.

Steven Bartlett 1:13:34 Are you concerned at all about the way education's going for children? Because-

Speaker 1:13:37 Oh, my God, yes!

Steven Bartlett 1:13:38 ... it appears that m- m- maybe my-

Speaker 1:13:40 Ed tech is, ed tech is, you know, big tech in a sweater, as they say.

Steven Bartlett 1:13:44 Because it-- I, I was almost imagining a future where my future kids are gonna learn their curriculum from an AI chatbot-

Speaker 1:13:51 Mm-hmm

Steven Bartlett 1:13:51 ... 'cause, you know, I can imagine the case: cheaper-

Speaker 1:13:54 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:13:54 ... more personalized, more convenient. It's gonna know my-- if my son's called Timmy, it's gonna know Timmy's brain, and it's gonna know how to make him pay attention and what he's interested in and what he's not. So are you concerned about this, or is this a good thing?

Speaker 1:14:07 There is definitely a use case for ed tech. Um, if there could be a device that only did math tutoring or only did tutoring, and you couldn't watch videos on it, I'm totally open to believing that that can speed up teaching. But here's what's happened.... We put computers on everyone's desks around twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen. We used to think in America that it was an equity issue, even back to the '90s. The rich kids all have computers, the poor kids don't. Let's get philanthropists to buy computers for s- school districts, that every kid can have a computer on their desk. Okay, now, what is a computer? It's a play device. It does everything. Kids use it at home. They, it, th- you know, they watch videos, they do all sorts of things. You put it on their desk, and you tell them to do math homework, what happens? It's mostly short videos. That's what research is showing. It ends up because they don't, you know, they always-- they don't block YouTube. They might say: "Oh, we block porn, we block video games." They can get around all that, and if you let them do YouTube, it's YouTube Shorts, which is TikTok. So what happened to test scores in the United States? From the '70s through twenty twelve, they were rising. We actually were improving what kids knew, what kids learned in the United States. We have very good data. The national, uh, the NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, goes up till twenty twelve, and then by twenty fifteen, it starts going down, and it's going down before COVID, and it goes down more during COVID, and everyone thinks like: "Oh, it's COVID," but it started go-- the peak was twenty twelve, and what's happening, what we now can see, is that the top students, the very best students, who are the ones with executive function, they're the ones who can pay attention, if you put a computer on that kid's desk, he's not destroyed by it. He can actually still learn, but the bottom fifty percent cannot. The bot-- so all of the drop in educational stats is the bottom fifty percent. The bottom fifty percent, in terms of capacity to pay attention, their education is being devastated, and that's what happened when we put laptops, and we put Chromebooks and iPads on their desks. Um, we spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this stuff, and it has damaged education, and if we'd spent a quarter of that on teachers, we would be in such better shape today. So we made a colossal blunder with edtech in the twenty tens, and now we're about to do the same thing again with AI. Again, maybe there are apps, maybe there are applications that will be great, but we've got to put the burden of proof on Silicon Valley. We've got to say: "You guys have to prove that this stuff is effective and safe before we'll let it in. We are not gonna let you just say, 'Hey, let's just flood the zone. Let's give it to everybody, and then we'll wait ten years and see what happens.'"

Steven Bartlett 1:16:33 I mean, that brings, brings up this, um, this study that I have in front of me here, which was a two thousand and twenty-two study, a Munich study, which tested the idea of brain rot, which, um, I believe was the Oxford Dictionary word-

Speaker 1:16:45 Mm-hmm, yes

Steven Bartlett 1:16:45 ... of the year two thousand and twenty-four? And what they did is they gave sixty participants a test, then a ten-minute break, and then another test. During the break, they either rested or used TikTok, Twitter, or YouTube, and the results showed the following: the TikTok group, so they had a ten-minute interval to do anything, and this group got TikTok to look at. Their memory ac-accuracy dropped from eighty percent before the break to forty-nine percent after the break, a nearly forty percent decline just from a ten-minute break. In contrast, the Twitter and YouTube groups showed no significant change in the Munich study, and there's an image I'll throw up on the screen. Results from the Munich study showed a forty percent drop in prospective memory accuracy in the TikTok group after a ten-minute break, which is unbelievable.

Speaker 1:17:31 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:17:32 It's unbelievable. What the hell is going on there? How can a ten-minute TikTok break drop my memory accuracy by forty percent?

Speaker 1:17:41 TikTok is brain rot. I mean, it's-

Steven Bartlett 1:17:42 What, what's going on?

Speaker 1:17:44 There's so much going on in the brain. So, you know, when you're thinking about... Here's the thing, brain breaks are not nice-to-haves. They're actually essential for your brain. And so we talked a little bit about that, you know, default mode network and what happens to it. When you're engaging with your devices, and, you know, that's not a brain break. That's activating all of the aspects. So it's activating your amygdala. It's dampening or decreasing the volume of your prefrontal cortex. It's creating that reward system, the dopamine hit, those addictive behaviors. So it's only... You know, when you're thinking about memory, planning, what was the metric here? It was memory, right?

Steven Bartlett 1:18:21 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:18:21 That was the, the, the metric that they were using to study. And so when you're thinking about working memory or, um, cognitive function, complex problem-solving, this is all prefrontal cortex. And so when you're engaging with TikTok, ten minutes, five minutes, whatever it is, you are dialing down that biology in your brain, and so of course, you're going to see changes, and you're going to see the flip side: increased hypervigilance, irritability, distractibility, fragmented attention. It's just-- again, this is not to say that this whole conversation, right, or when you're reading studies, you might say to yourself: "What's wrong with me?" You know, "Is there something wrong with me? Am I-- is my brain broken? Am I weak?"

Speaker 1:19:00 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:19:00 It is not you. You are not alone. It is not your fault. It is the biology of your brain doing exactly as it should. So we talked about the amygdala and prefrontal cortex here. Your amygdala is not wrong or broken. It's by design, supposed to think about your immediate needs, survival, self-preservation, and so when you're on the algorithm, we know we talked about, you know, certain, um-- or maybe we didn't talk about it, certain content that you see on TikTok and others, that is, when it's reactionary, you know, words like FOMO or rage bait, these are not neutral terms. When you're engaging with these, uh, social media platforms, it's not something neutral, it's not passive. It is an active biological process in your brain. So this study, it's not surprising. It is actually exactly what you would expect o-- to happen to your biology if you had this sort of, what we call in medicine, this kind of intervention. It's stimulating exactly what-

Speaker 1:19:54 Mm

Speaker 1:19:54 ... it's supposed to do.

Speaker 1:19:56 Yeah. I'll just, I'll just add on to what Aditi said, that there are some-- there are many medical conditions where you can't just go to the patient and say: "Why do you think you got this cancer?" "Oh, I, you know, I think it's because I ate a lot of, you know, chocolate when I was..." Whatever. You know, there, when, when the ef-- when the, the, the act is separated from the effect by thirty years, then you don't expect the patients to have insight into the cause of it. But when the outcome is separated from the input by seconds, and you have literally millions of chances to observe the covariation-... the patient is really, really accurate. In fact, the patient really knows what's going on. And so I think the deciding factor here on this big debate about, oh, is it just correlation or is it causation? Um, the deciding factor for social media and for a lot of these tech innovations, including video games and gambling and all of that, should really be the kids. And if the kids say, "This is bad for me," we should take their word for it, given that we also have correlational studies, random controlled trials, uh, uh, longitudinal studies, nat- I mean, we have so much other data, but given that the kids themselves, they call it brain rot. They call the material brain rot. Um, my students tell me it's a huge obstacle to them doing their homework. As one of them said, "I pull out a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok." You know, so if they're telling us that this is damaging their ability to pay attention, they feel it, they feel the loss, we all feel it, well, many of us have noticed this, um, um, then I think this is pretty decisive evidence that this stuff is bad for cognition.

Speaker 1:21:30 And it has long-term consequences, so it's not just that in the moment, right? So there was this case that was all over the media, a college student, I'm sure you're familiar with the case, and this young woman was on TikTok experiencing brain rot, and then some TikTok algorithm took her down to this place of, you know, "You should take an edible. It'll help you."

Speaker 1:21:51 Okay.

Speaker 1:21:51 So you can-

Speaker 1:21:52 Oh, wow. Wow.

Speaker 1:21:52 -go to class.

Speaker 1:21:53 Prescribing drugs. Wow.

Speaker 1:21:54 And you could go to class, and you could, you know, be more alert, and so she did that. And then it continued on and on, and then she developed a dependence-

Speaker 1:22:03 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:22:03 ... on edibles and then checked into rehab. And only when she focused on analog activities, like guitar playing-

Speaker 1:22:11 Mm

Speaker 1:22:11 ... and a couple of other things that she started doing, is when-- and, you know, removing the stimulus, the, the TikTok, um, algorithm, is when she started to improve. So it's not just in the moment, "Oh, I can't remember something-

Speaker 1:22:24 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:22:24 ... or I'm more irritable." These sorts of things compound, and the long-term sequelae or the long-term effects can be quite damaging. That's just one example.

Steven Bartlett 1:22:35 In your book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan, you use-- the, the subtitle here is: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Speaker 1:22:43 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:22:43 I was looking at some of these graphs of different sort of mental illness, illnesses, and, um, they're increasing. One of them that's increasing is ADHD.

Speaker 1:22:53 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:22:54 I was diagnosed with ADHD, um, maybe about a year ago. And when we're talking about short attention spans, I mean, the name Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, uh, I believe that's-

Speaker 1:23:05 Mm-hmm

Steven Bartlett 1:23:05 ... what it's called, sounds a lot like what we're talking about.

Speaker 1:23:08 Mm, yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:23:09 Is there a link, do you believe, between the increase in diagnoses of, of ADHD and the sort of frying of our brains-

Speaker 1:23:17 Mm-hmm

Steven Bartlett 1:23:17 ... with short-form video and social media?

Speaker 1:23:20 Mm-hmm. Yeah, I, I mean, I suspect that there is, but here's, here's what I can tell you I learned while writing the book. Um, I looked to see if there were studies indicating that, uh, heavy use of, of social media and video games and all the electronic stuff caused ADHD, and when I was doing the research in 2023, I did not find evidence that it will give a kid HD-- ADHD who otherwise wouldn't have it. What I did find was evidence that for kids who have ADHD, when you let them have the devices, the video games, all that, their symptoms get much worse. And so because it is a major achievement of young adulthood to be able to pay attention-

Steven Bartlett 1:23:55 Mm

Speaker 1:23:55 ... to develop what we've been calling executive function, to be able to make a plan and decide, "Oh, to reach the plan, I have to do this, and then I do this, and then it might be a long time before I get here, but I will keep going, and I will keep my eye on the prize," that... I, I assume that's-- you're saying it's a little harder for you to do that? I mean, that's what ADHD means. How do you experience ADHD?

Steven Bartlett 1:24:14 Well, [exhaling] well, hmm. I def-- I mean, if I think about school, I couldn't pay attention in school for, for, for very long, and that meant that I was always in ex- ex- the expulsion room, and then I was expelled. And then that's kind of... it's-- I feel like it's got worse as an adult.

Speaker 1:24:30 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:30 And from my-- in my opinion, my relationship with my phone has made it much worse.

Speaker 1:24:35 Mm.

Speaker 1:24:35 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:36 Where really, I can't, I can't pay attention to, to many things for a very long time. The exception to this is I can do deep work for many, many hours without [chuckles] moving. It's almost a bit of a contradiction.

Speaker 1:24:47 When you are extremely motivated, I assume.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:49 When I'm extremely motivated.

Speaker 1:24:49 When you're really into it-

Steven Bartlett 1:24:51 Oh, my gosh, yeah

Speaker 1:24:51 ... you can be into it.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:52 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:24:52 That's right. But a lot of work isn't that.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:54 Yeah.

Speaker 1:24:54 A lot of being effective in the workplace is not you're following your passion, right? ADHD kids, they can zoom in because they're getting the dopamine. They're getting the dopamine from this thing. But a lot of work isn't like that, and these kids are not gonna be able to do that. So actually, what you said, it fits perfectly with what, what I found from those Dutch studies. If you did have, whether it's a genetic or whatever the predisposition is, the f- this environment has made your symptoms worse.

Steven Bartlett 1:25:18 Yeah.

Speaker 1:25:18 Now, of course, ADHD kids can be incredibly, uh, creative. They are often very, very successful. But my fear is that the pathways to success that they used to take might be blocked if they basically are just scrolling all day long and not able to pay-- not able to, um, have real-life experiences.

Steven Bartlett 1:25:34 And relationships are like that, especially romantic ones.

Speaker 1:25:36 It's an interesting thing that you bring up, Steven, because there is an increase in adult onset... You know, when adults are diagnosed with ADHD, because typically we think of ADHD as a pediatric condition or young adults, and so increasingly, we're seeing more and more adults who are in their 30s and 40s, 50s, sometimes even 60s, who are being diagnosed, newly diagnosed with ADHD. And so that's an interesting-- there's so many-

Speaker 1:26:00 Mm

Speaker 1:26:00 ... um, you know, reasons. Like, it might be that they had it all along, and they were diagnosed, and so what is going on there? That would be a, a future podcast episode for an ADHA- ADHD expert of, you know, what are the drivers of why are so many adults-

Speaker 1:26:15 Mm

Speaker 1:26:15 ... being diagnosed with ADHD?

Steven Bartlett 1:26:17 Or maybe even just the symptoms looking very similar.

Speaker 1:26:20 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:26:20 Um-

Speaker 1:26:20 Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Steven Bartlett 1:26:22 You talk about popcorn brain, Aditi.

Speaker 1:26:24 Yeah. So, you know, we've talked about brain rot and the primal urge to scroll, and popcorn brain is kind of an offshoot. It's part of the same family, and so what happens is, it's a term coined by a man, a psychologist named David Levy.... and what happens with popcorn brain is that you, and we all have it, and so what it is a societal phenomenon when you spend too much time online and you are overstimulated, and so it is hard for you to spend time offline. Offline feels slow, boring-

Steven Bartlett 1:26:52 Mm-hmm. Right.

Speaker 1:26:52 -because things are moving at a much slower pace. And so popcorn brain is the sensation of your brain popping. It is not actively popping. It's not like your brain cells are popping, but it sure feels like it. And so your primal urge to scroll kind of primes your brain to develop popcorn brain. You are more at risk for developing popcorn brain when you feel a sense of stress because of that primal urge to scroll. The differentiator between brain rot and popcorn brain-- again, these are societal terms that we're calling for a constellation or a group of symptoms, right? And so the difference to me is that popcorn brain is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. It's like we all have it, and it's happening all at, all the time because of the modern age and a lot of the things that we talked about. Brain rot is a little bit more specific. It's a little bit more well defined, so it has certain features, like we call it the biopsychosocial model, when you're thinking about a particular medical or condition or an entity. So what are the biological factors? We talked about what defines brain rot. It's, you know, a change in brainwaves, a change in brain regions, the amygdala lighting up and the prefrontal cortex kind of being quiet. Um, psychological factors, we talked about attention, um, co- complex problem-solving, impulse control, and then the social factors, loneliness and others, so, um, compulsion. And so I would say popcorn brain is something that we all suffer from, and, you know, brain

Speaker 1:28:18 rot is something that is very specific. The other thing that we haven't talked about that I would love to kind of... Because so much of our conversation is, like, doom and gloom, right?

Steven Bartlett 1:28:26 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:28:26 It's like, wah, wah, wah. Uh, one thing that I would like to say is that as bad as-- uh, when you hear the term brain rot, it seems permanent because rot, it connotes like deterioration. That's it. It's one-sided. It's one way, and that's it. But in fact, popcorn brain and brain rot are reversible conditions. So it is not-

Steven Bartlett 1:28:47 In adults.

Speaker 1:28:48 In adults.

Steven Bartlett 1:28:48 If you've gone through puberty with it, it's not so clear.

Speaker 1:28:51 Yes, in adults, and my work focuses on adults. And so when you have-- if you experience brain rot in your thirties, forties and beyond, you can... It takes time. You know, it takes eight weeks for your brain to rewire itself, give yourself time. A sense of self-compassion is really important, but you can-- You know, there is a sense of it being able to be reversed. So it's not so much a brain- it's not a fixed trait, but rather a brain state.

Steven Bartlett 1:29:16 What's adult-

Speaker 1:29:16 So I think it's important to offer that hope.

Steven Bartlett 1:29:18 What is an adult brain? What age is an adult brain-- Like, what age does my brain stop growing in, in the way where it's reversible?

Speaker 1:29:24 So-

Steven Bartlett 1:29:24 Yeah, the, I mean, the, you know, traditionally, it was thought that, uh, you know, puberty is the period of super rapid brain change, and that begins, you know, early, early teens, sometimes even before ten, and is mostly over by sort of, you know, mid, mid to late teens. But then the prefrontal cortex, which Aditi was talking about, which is so important for impulse control and, and executive function, that doesn't finish myelinating. Myelin is when you, the sort of the, the neuron that, that you get a sort of a fatty sheath, like an insulation, that sort of locks down the circuits and makes them more efficient. Um, that doesn't stop until around age twenty-five, is what we've always said for many years. But you're telling me that there's new research showing that-

Speaker 1:29:59 Yeah!

Steven Bartlett 1:30:00 Tell, tell us about that.

Speaker 1:30:01 So, you know, all this time, right, we've always said that the prefrontal cortex is fully formed and fully functional at the age of twenty-five.

Steven Bartlett 1:30:07 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:30:08 And so when you're talking about impulse control and all of this stuff, but there was this really interesting study. I'll send it to you. It, um, looked at, I think it was one thousand people, um, from age zero, so birth all the way to ninety, so the entire population, and, um, it found five-- it looked at lifespan and said there are actually five stages. So first is childhood, up zero to age nine. During this time, your brain is not very efficient-

Steven Bartlett 1:30:34 Right.

Speaker 1:30:34 -but it's really growing-

Steven Bartlett 1:30:36 Very flexible. Yeah.

Speaker 1:30:36 -and, you know, it's, it's growing and changing, but it's not really efficient. Nine to thirty-two-

Steven Bartlett 1:30:41 Hmm

Speaker 1:30:41 ... is considered adolescence. And so, you know, thirty-two is when adolescence ends, apparently, according to this new research.

Steven Bartlett 1:30:48 But it'd be sort of grad-- I mean, you're most of the way done by twenty-five.

Speaker 1:30:50 Right, sure.

Steven Bartlett 1:30:50 But you're-- but there's still some, there's some flexibility even after that.

Speaker 1:30:54 And then the-

Steven Bartlett 1:30:54 Yeah

Speaker 1:30:54 ... next stage is from thirty-three to, I think, sixty-three. Sixty-six is, like, adulthood. Things are very stable. Learning is stable, and, you know, um, it's efficient, and it's, it, it, things are doing well. [chuckles] And then-

Steven Bartlett 1:31:11 We're productive.

Speaker 1:31:11 -sixty-- yeah, sixty-six to about eighty-three is early aging, and so that's when you see some of the age-related changes, and then eighty-three plus is late aging. So the, the kind of main finding was that, you know, it was all over the news. It was like, adolescence goes until thirty-two.

Steven Bartlett 1:31:29 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:31:30 [lips smack]

Steven Bartlett 1:31:31 So I'm thirty-three, so I'm um- [laughing]

Speaker 1:31:33 One year, one year out! [chuckles]

Steven Bartlett 1:31:34 I'm cooked by now.

Speaker 1:31:35 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:31:36 When you wrote this book, Jonathan, The Anxious Generation, it, um, it's had a big impact on the world in a way that I think any author might dream of. And I know this in part because, you know, I sit on this podcast interviewing really interesting people all the time, and even this morning, when I did an interview across town with James Sexton, he talked about this book twice.

Speaker 1:31:54 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 1:31:55 And, you know, laws have been changed around the world, inspired by this

Steven Bartlett 1:31:59 book, and we're actually seeing an increase of laws in the UK. I mean, Australia just banned, I think, social media for people under sixteen.

Speaker 1:32:05 Up to sixteen. Yep.

Speaker 1:32:06 You met with Macron-

Speaker 1:32:07 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:32:08 ... right?

Speaker 1:32:08 Yeah, yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:32:09 Could you ever have imagined... And actually, what does the success of this book say-

Speaker 1:32:14 Yeah, yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:32:15 ... about society?

Speaker 1:32:16 No, thank you for that question, 'cause, you know, I, I do tend to get-- You know, as you've heard, I mean, I'm extremely alarmed about these trends, and these are gigantic threats beyond what anyone can imagine. But here's the amazing thing, is that we can reverse this for almost no money, and it's completely bipartisan, and it's not that hard to do, um, and we're doing it.... And so what happened was, you know, I wrote the book as an American, assuming that we don't have a functioning legislature, the Congress can be stopped, we have a vitocracy, the social media companies can stop anything in the House. So I wrote this assuming, you know, we'll never get legislation, um, so we have to do this on our own. And I proposed four norms: no smartphone before high school, no social media before sixteen, phone-free schools, and far more independence, free play, responsibility in the real world. So four norms, we can try to do this with collective action locally at the school level. Two things that surprised me: [clears throat] one, are that immediately, governors from red states and blue states started reaching out to me. Our states actually function. Our states have governments that are accountable to the people, that are trying to get good results, and so this has been a totally bipartisan issue. Sarah Huckabee Sanders from Arkansas was one of the very first. Kathy Hochul also. And it is-- it tends to be more female legislators and governors or spouses of heads of state, and the moms-- The book really spoke to moms because moms around the world, they felt the kids being pulled away. I believe they felt it viscerally more than the dads did. Also, the dads kind of like the video games. They're a little more pro-tech. So I think the moms felt the pain more and took it more personally. So when the book came out, mothers around the world jumped into action, formed groups, pushed for legislation, and changes began happening. What I just, I just, l-- I was just, I was in Davos and then London and Brussels two weeks ago, and what I saw was a complete sea change in the world's thinking about how we need to have age limits on social media and other tech. And here's what I think just happened. It's so, it's so cool. It just dawned on me literally while I was in London, like I was pushing on open doors everywhere. Wherever I went, people wanted to do this. I went to the EU, they want to do this. Like, what is happening? And what I realized is this: Steven Pinker has a book out last year called When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. It's about the immediate change in a social system when private knowledge, you know, everybody knows that the emperor has no clothes, everybody knows that this, you know, ideology doesn't work. Everybody knows that, but they don't all know that everybody else knows it, and that everybody else knows that. And so in The Emperor's New Clothes, everybody thought he, he's, "I, I don't think he has any clothes on, but maybe, you know, maybe only wise people can see it." But when the child says: "The emperor has no clothes," and then in the Hans Christian Andersen story, it says, "And the people began whispering to each other, and then they all cried out in unison." And that's what happened when Australia's law went into effect. So I believe that, uh, December 10th of last December was the global turning point in the battle to reclaim childhood, and if we reclaim that, we move on to our attention and adult life as well. What happened on, uh, on December 10th, the Australia law went into effect. The sky didn't fall. People weren't locked out of their accounts. All the companies complied. They shut down five million, uh, accounts for Australia's three and a half million kids that were underage, uh, two and a half million kids. The sky didn't fall, and there was a lot of news coverage around the world of what Australia was doing, and a lot of the news coverage included opinions from the writers saying: "Why can't we do that? Hey, let's do that here." And when everybody saw that everybody was looking at Australia and saying, "Let's do that here," then everybody knew that everybody knew that this is just completely bonkers to have children being raised on social media platforms, talking with s- anonymous strangers and being fed algorithm, algorithmically curated garbage. So I believe that that's why 2026 is going to be the year when at least fifteen countries are going to commit to passing an age minimum law. In 2025, it was one, Australia, and now we already have Indonesia. Their law goes into effect in March. Uh, I met with Macron in, uh, uh, in Davos, and a th- a few days, he was preparing to push a bill through the assembly, and he got it. He's the first in the EU, but a lot of other countries in the EU are going to follow. The whole EU is likely to do it. Um, so, so yes, I am incredibly alarmed about how big this problem is, but I'm incredibly inspired that the whole world is rising up to do something about it. We actually can control our fate, and that was not clear before December 10th.

Speaker 1:36:49 Bravo! As a mother-

Speaker 1:36:50 [laughing]

Speaker 1:36:50 ... That was the first thing I said to you.

Speaker 1:36:52 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:36:52 The first thing I said to you was, "Thank you, as a mom, for changing my family's life."

Speaker 1:36:59 Thank you, Aditi.

Steven Bartlett 1:37:03 It's a really special accomplishment, Jonathan. You know, I could-- there's no real words that I could say that could quite capture the long-term impact that that's going to have on billions of people's lives, and not just the direct, but also the indirect, in all the ways we've described, their ability to form connections, to fall in love, to find meaning and purpose in their lives and their neuroscience, and therefore, you know, the neuroscience of their, their children and their children's children, and so on. So it's a really, it's a really overwhelming accomplishment. [chuckles]

Speaker 1:37:36 It, it, well, it was a bizarre situation that I walked into with the unique abilities of a social psychologist. That is, everybody was upset about this. Everybody could see it, but they thought, "Well, this is my problem," or, "In my family, we have this problem." And, um, and I came to this with fresh eyes. Uh, my dissertation was on moral development. I'd studied adolescent behavior longer ago in my career, and I've written about it in all my books, so it wasn't totally new to me. But I came into the field of social media studies around 2018, 2019. I really immersed myself in it. And it was like, you know, you walk in, and immediately you see, wait, this is a trap. People are on it because people are on it, and the kids are complaining about that. Everyone's complaining about it, and the only reason they can't get off is because everyone else is on it. So I think I was able to see that, and then also, COVID confused us for a few years. So it wasn't until COVID was in the rearview mirror that it was possible for everybody to say, "Wait, this is crazy." And so I was incredibly lucky in terms of the timing. My book happened to come out in March of 2024, just as the world was ready to see, like, "Wait, what have we done to our kids? Let's undo it."

Steven Bartlett 1:38:42 ... And you said you're now focusing more on short-form video?

Speaker 1:38:45 So, yes. So in studying older Gen Z, these are the people who went through puberty, uh, on Instagram. Um, I should- l- if I could just lay out that it's very important to get the timing, to, that everyone understands the timing, 'cause this is what... You mentioned the polycrisis before. The polycrisis, I believe, begins between 2010 and 2015, and here's why. So we've had the internet for a long time, and it was marvelous! We loved the internet in the '90s. It's gonna be the best friend of democracy, okay? And then the iPhone comes out, and it's amazing. Oh, my God, there's just so many things. Everything seems great. Okay, so in 2010, most of, almost all of us have flip phones. The iPhone's spreading, but it's still mostly flip phones. Teens are all on flip phones, basic phones, and we call those people millennials. If you finished puberty by 20... If you, if you were born in, say, 1990, and you start puberty, uh, in 2002, you're done by 2008, so, you know, in there. Um, if you got through puberty before you got on Instagram, you're a millennial. Whereas if you're born, say, well, if you were born after 1995, but let's say if you're born in the year 2000, you begin puberty in 2012, and you're not done until 2016, 2018. So in 2010, everyone has a flip phone with no front-facing camera, no high-speed internet. You have to pay for your texts, so you use it to call people and to text them, and that's it. It was a communication device, and that's why the millennials have good mental health. They are the last mentally healthy and successful generation. But if you're Gen Z, you got, uh... 2012 is the year that now most people now have a smartphone. It's the year that Facebook buys Instagram. They don't change it at first, but that's the year that all the girls go on it. Um, everyone now has high-speed data. Front-facing camera came out in 2010. So by 2015, we're in a radically different world. For children's development, it's now radically different, much more hostile to human development, and that's what we did to Gen Z, and now we're doing to Gen Alpha. For politics, it was, you know, it was crazy for all sorts of reasons in every decade, and especially, you know, the, in the early 2000s. There's a lot, there's a culture war going on. There's all kinds of stuff going on, but it was when, it was when everyone has-- really, Twitter was the biggest perpetrator of this. When everyone has Twitter, and everyone's checking all the time, and anything can blow up. You know, you described the way there was, you know, variance in, in, on TikTok. Um, i- if you get it just right, it can blow up. You can have huge impact. That's when the democracy... D- if democracy is a conversation, when it moved from newspapers and, you know, even simple web bulletin boards, when it moved to super viral retweet buttons, all of that, that's all 2010 to 2015. So that's why since then, everything has been insane, and it's gonna just keep getting more insane. And that's why I believe we have this polycrisis, because it, it... And there's more to it. It's not just the technology, but I believe the transformation of our, our connection and our information flow and our addiction, all of that is radically different by 2015 compared to how it was in 2010, and now everything else builds on top of that, I believe. What, what do you think? Do you think that makes sense?

Speaker 1:41:48 I think there's one more data point to add, in that 2014 was the year that things really... It was the tipping point-

Speaker 1:41:55 Yes

Speaker 1:41:56 ... like you say.

Speaker 1:41:56 Yes, that's, yes, that's the year that I point to, too. Yes.

Speaker 1:41:58 Yeah, so before-

Speaker 1:41:59 What, what do you point to? What, what makes you think 2014?

Speaker 1:42:00 So when you look at the data, you see that time spent alone, when you compare-- when you look at data from, like, the 1960s to 2014-

Speaker 1:42:09 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:42:10 ... there, it was kind of stable. Americans spending time alone, spending time with friends.

Speaker 1:42:14 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:42:15 Kind of the same, right? So people spent kind of the same amount of time with friends, same amount of time alone over those decades. 2014 marks a shift, and there is a steep rise in time spent alone and a drop in time spent with friends.

Speaker 1:42:32 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:42:32 And so what happens in 2014, it is when the majority of Americans get a smartphone, and it's not to say... Again, we've said, you know, causality, correlation-

Speaker 1:42:43 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:42:43 ... which is it? But there is, like, based on everything that we've talked about, my gosh, is there an association between that. This is not to say that time spent alone-- You know, when I share this data, people may say, "You know, but I like spending time alone."

Speaker 1:42:56 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:42:56 "I'm not lonely. I'm okay." This is not about being an introvert or an extrovert. It's not about... You know, you can have solitude-

Speaker 1:43:03 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:43:03 ... and feel great, and you're not lonely, but we are human beings, and we are social creatures. This is just how we are built evolutionarily, and so-

Speaker 1:43:12 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:43:12 ... that is a real red flag when you have this big jump in time-

Speaker 1:43:18 Yeah

Speaker 1:43:18 ... spent alone very much the same year. And so my work focuses on adults, Jonathan, on kids, but there's this, you know, that's the moment, right? 2014, where everything changed. [paper rips]

Steven Bartlett 1:43:30 Last month, I told you about our sponsor, Function Health, and their team, who've developed a way of giving you a full 360 view of what's going on inside your body. They offer over 100 advanced lab tests, covering everything from hormones, toxins, inflammation, heart health, stress, and so much more. So Jack, who started this show with me, got his first blood draw done a couple of weeks ago, so I thought I'd let him tell you a little bit more about his experience.

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Speaker 1:44:35 ... There's a phase a lot of companies hit where they're no longer doing the most important thing, which is selling, and they get really bogged down with admin, and it's often something that creeps up slowly, and you don't really notice until it's happened. Slowly, momentum starts to leak out. This happened to us, and our sponsor, Pipedrive, was a fix I came across ten years ago, and ever since, my teams across my different companies have continued to use it. Pipedrive is a simple but powerful sales CRM that gives you the visibility on any deals in your pipeline. It also automates a lot of the tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming parts of the sales process, which in turn saves you so many hours every single month, which means you can get back to selling. Making that early decision to switch to Pipedrive was a real game-changer, and it's kept the right things front of mind. My favorite feature is Pipedrive's ability to sync your CRM with multiple email inboxes so your entire team can work together from one platform. And we aren't the only ones benefiting. Over one hundred thousand companies use Pipedrive to grow their business. So if something I've said resonates, head over to pipedrive.com/ceo, where you can get a thirty-day free trial, no credit card or payment required. [paper rustling] So what do we do about this? Because when I look at all the stats, um, we did all these audience surveys ahead of this, people are spending

Speaker 1:45:47 roughly, in our audience, about six and a half hours a day on their phones. Um, short-form videos are only going to get more addictive. AI's-

Speaker 1:45:53 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:45:53 ... going to know me more. It's going to be more personalized. The content is going to be generated just for me.

Speaker 1:45:57 Yeah.

Speaker 1:45:58 What, what am I-- what, what's next? Is it a law we need to pass? Is it something I need to do myself?

Speaker 1:46:03 Mm-hmm. So we-- I think we need to pick the low-hanging fruit first, and the reason for that is not just efficiency, it's that we have to prove that we can actually do something, because we've never done anything. We've never done anything to restrain this. We've let Silicon Valley run wild. Congress gave them special protection, Section two thirty. Nobody can sue them for killing their kids if they, if they feed them content. They, they can't be held responsible.

Speaker 1:46:25 I think Section two thirty is-

Speaker 1:46:26 Oh

Speaker 1:46:26 ... probably something worth explaining.

Speaker 1:46:27 Sure. Se-- the Communications Decency Act, uh, nineteen ninety-seven, I think it was. Plus or minus a year. Uh, there's a section in it that the goal was to specifically let the tech companies like AOL back then, you know, let them take down pornographic content, because they were afraid, "If we take down anything, then we're responsible for everything, and now we're gonna... It's gonna be endless." We c-- you know, so Congress specifically said: "No, don't worry, don't worry. You know, if you choose to take something down, nobody can sue you for, you know, for what you leave up." So the, it was a good intention originally, but the courts have interpreted it so widely as to say: "No one can regulate social media. They're not responsible for hurting kids. You can't sue them," and they have never faced a jury. They have never... No parent has ever gotten justice from them, despite all the kids whose lives have been ruined, all the kids who are dead, and that's gonna change. That's changing just now, the, in, here in February in, in Los Angeles. So because w- the, the US Congress sort of set up this problem, and it also, in a different law, said: "How old does a kid have to be before a company can take their data without their parents' knowledge or permission, before a company can expose them to all kinds of stuff, before a company can have them sign away their rights? How old?" And the original law said, "Sixteen. Let's try sixteen," you know, 'cause, uh, you know, it wasn't so sick and twisted back then, nineteen ninety-eight, COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. So but it-- various lobbying, they pushed it down from sixteen to thirteen, and they gutted enforcement. So as long as... And that's why all over the internet, it's, "Are you thirteen?" Or, "What's your birth year?" And as long as you're thirteen, you're in. For porn, and you have to say you're eighteen. So because we-- the l-- it's a few laws that set this up, we definitely need laws to undo it, especially for kids. So what I'm advocating is, let's do the easy stuff, the high-impact stuff for kids, because that is totally not politically controversial. There is no left-right divide on that, and that's been true everywhere: Australia, Britain, the EU, everywhere. Regulating the internet for adults, regulating social media for its destructive properties in democracy is a hell of a lot harder, and I don't have easy answers. There's a lot we could do to reduce the virality, the spread of, of the-- because extreme con-- So there are lots of little things that we can do, and Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower-

Speaker 1:48:34 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:48:34 ... had all kinds of ideas. So we definitely can do things to make it less toxic for democracy. But those are going to be politically controversial, because one side is going to benefit from it more than the other, so that's going to be very difficult to do. I don't know if we can do them in the US, but let's just all do the-- let's just all protect the kids. That way, we show globally that we actually can do something, and if we do that, then I think we will be able to do some basic things about AI, like no companion chatbots if you're under eighteen. You know, these things already have a body count. A lot of kids have been encouraged to kill themselves. They already have driven million, or hundreds of thousands or millions of people into psychosis. So we'll be able to, I believe, put some limits on, uh, on AI, especially for kids. But if we can't get this, if we can't win on social media for kids, then I don't think we have any chance to regulate AI. It's going to be much more difficult. What do you think? What do you think we should do, and what do you think we can do?

Speaker 1:49:25 So my work as a doctor, I think about what we can do and how I can empower people to first build awareness. So, you know, I aim to first normalize and validate the experience with everyone who is engaging with chatbots. And so I don't like to shame people, because as a doctor, right, like, you want, you want to meet the patient where they are. And so I won't shame someone to say, you know, "Why are you using this?" Um, "Why is your boyfriend AI?"

Speaker 1:49:54 [chuckles]

Speaker 1:49:54 "Or why are you getting married to AI?"

Speaker 1:49:56 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:49:56 "Or why are you using AI for a, a therapist?" One of my followers on social media, it still makes me laugh. I put out a call saying: "Why are you using AI f-- as your, as a therapist," you know? And so someone wrote to me. It was great. I screenshotted it. It said: "Because all human therapists are trash," with a trash can emoji.

Speaker 1:50:14 Whoa!

Speaker 1:50:14 And it made me laugh.

Speaker 1:50:15 Whoa.

Speaker 1:50:15 And I said, you know... So there is-- So to me, when I think about what's happening and what we can do, it's no mistake that we're here right now. So the pandemic, like we've talked about, was a huge driver, social isolation-

Speaker 1:50:28 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:50:28 ... uh, hyper-reliance on self, right?

Speaker 1:50:32 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:50:32 Then the proliferation of technology that-

Speaker 1:50:36 ... replaced human interaction.

Steven Bartlett 1:50:37 Yeah.

Speaker 1:50:38 Zoom board meetings, Zoom funerals-

Steven Bartlett 1:50:40 Ah.

Speaker 1:50:40 Zoom birthday parties-

Steven Bartlett 1:50:42 Yeah

Speaker 1:50:42 ... Zoom graduations, things that we did in person are now online. And then personally, as a doctor, I was a talking head during the pandemic for lots of news channels about the vaccine. I have a background in public health as well. Uh, immense distrust and mistrust in establishment and experts.

Steven Bartlett 1:51:01 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:51:01 And so it's like, "I'm gonna do my own research. I'm not gonna go see a doctor or a therapist. I'm gonna talk to my chatbot." And also, I mean, you know, let's keep it real, the cost, right? So people are struggling.

Steven Bartlett 1:51:12 Mm.

Speaker 1:51:12 They're in financial crises. It- there's an unmet need, yes, for human connection, but also for good therapy or, you know, good medical care because there is such a need because of the pandemic, and people aren't getting the care that they need, that they deserve. There's so many factors here, and so uh what I've been focusing on this year particularly is learning about AI chatbots, how they are influencing mental health, what is actually happening? 'Cause I'm a human first, AI second person, and it's like my work focuses on high touch, and AI is high tech, and this is the first-

Steven Bartlett 1:51:45 Mm

Speaker 1:51:45 ... intervention that we are seeing that is high tech, that is becoming high touch, and that scares me.

Steven Bartlett 1:51:52 And you're writing a book about that at the moment, right?

Speaker 1:51:54 I am. And so-

Steven Bartlett 1:51:55 Called Bot Brain.

Speaker 1:51:56 It's called Bot Brain: How to Stay Calm, Resilient, and Human in the Face of AI. And so really thinking about how are we going to be able to live with this technology? I love Jonathan's stance is to say, "Out! AI [chuckles] AI companions, done."

Jonathan Haidt 1:52:13 For kids, yeah.

Speaker 1:52:14 For kids, yeah.

Jonathan Haidt 1:52:14 Until proven safe.

Speaker 1:52:16 Totally agree, but in terms of adults, like, how do we manage that for adults, you know? And so my work focuses... Right now, what I'm doing is I'm spending- I've been spent- I've spent the year talking to every, as many AI researchers who are working on these models or who are doing research on the downstream effects of these models. And when I say that it is dark and dystopian, it has profoundly changed something in me, and it has-

Steven Bartlett 1:52:40 Mm

Speaker 1:52:40 ... influenced my mental health. I had to take a step away from just- because I couldn't believe-

Jonathan Haidt 1:52:44 Wow

Speaker 1:52:44 ... what I was learning.

Jonathan Haidt 1:52:45 Wait, could you just give-- Yeah, give us [laughing] examples-

Speaker 1:52:48 Yeah

Jonathan Haidt 1:52:48 ... so that-

Speaker 1:52:48 Teaser. A teaser.

Steven Bartlett 1:52:49 [chuckles] This is intriguing.

Speaker 1:52:51 So one-- I spoke to one of the scientists who told me that, um, you know, there's the echo chamber phenomenon in social media, right? Where we all know what that is. It's like you, you- it's a fragmented, fragmented world because of social, and you're engaging, and then you get the same... The algorithm feeds you the same kind of thoughts that you already have. But particularly now, with AI chatbots, when you're engaging with your chatbot, even just talking about it, I'm getting chills. It's the echo chamber of one. So it's you speaking to you. It's like the fun house mirror.

Steven Bartlett 1:53:22 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:53:22 And then it's giving you a response, and then you're talking, and it's giving you a response. But people, regular users who are using AI chatbots, think that it's wise, compassionate, non-judgmental, unbiased, empathetic, these human attributes. And so, um, you know, the echo chamber of one is kind of one idea that really frightened me, and the second one was the drift phenomenon.

Steven Bartlett 1:53:45 Mm.

Speaker 1:53:45 The drift phenomenon is this idea that you are engaging with your chatbot, and it's engaging with you, and it's, um, actively changing your beliefs through the drift.

Steven Bartlett 1:53:56 Mm.

Speaker 1:53:56 So you might start off as one belief, and then you're talking, and through this amplification fun house mirror effect, it slowly shifts your belief to something altogether different. You've heard cases of it in the news, where people, you know, start... You have a plumbing problem. You go to your AI chatbot. You ask them how to fix your sink, and then you're like, "You know what? Can you tell me about the meaning of life?" And then you start talking-

Steven Bartlett 1:54:17 [chuckles]

Speaker 1:54:17 ... about that, and before you know it, you have these theories, and you're getting that validation. And so a lot of my work over the past year has been, um, you know, digging into the science of what is going on in the brain. How are you forming, not us particularly at this table, but millions of people are forming a sense of attachment-

Steven Bartlett 1:54:36 Mm

Speaker 1:54:36 ... a therapeutic connection with their chatbot. They're, um, you know, giving names to it, and it's an entity. And so how does that happen, and how is it going to replace human-to-human connection? And so it terrifies me. I've also gone through some AI therapy myself just to see-

Jonathan Haidt 1:54:54 Mm. Oh, how was it?

Speaker 1:54:55 ... you know, what, what would happen. It was very interesting. I knew what was happening as it was happening.

Jonathan Haidt 1:54:59 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:55:00 So certain words that they used, and, you know, I was like, "Ah, I see what you did here."

Jonathan Haidt 1:55:05 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:55:05 Um, and so it's been, it's been a journey, and I'm, I'm frightened, frankly, f- of what, of what it means for all of us. And my approach, uh, uh, kind of, you know, not like Jonathan's... I, I love Jonathan's approach. I, you know, I think, yes, we need legislation, but my approach is more, I would say, tempered in that I think that we- there's utility for AI chatbots for certain people because of access or, you know, need, et cetera.

Jonathan Haidt 1:55:33 Yeah.

Speaker 1:55:33 Like, if you are LGBTQIA+ and you live in an area that is not very open, and you need to talk to someone, you can't go to your therapist, it's like maybe you can use an AI chatbot. So there are certain cases, a case-by-case basis, but my work will focus-- this particular book will focus on ways that you can first understand and build awareness of what's happening with this interaction, and then what you can do to manage that.

Steven Bartlett 1:55:59 I, um, didn't realize that my chatbot was giving me a tailored experience until one day when I had a debate with my friends about who the best football player in the world was, and we all went to our ChatGPTs and asked it, and mine said Messi, and his said Ronaldo. And I, I thought he was lying, so I was like: "Video record." And he video recorded it, and his gave him a completely different answer to the same question. And we-

Jonathan Haidt 1:56:22 And did it know that you were each fans of-

Steven Bartlett 1:56:24 Well, this is the thing. I think it's got such a huge amount of memory on me that it knew what I wanted to hear.

Jonathan Haidt 1:56:28 Oh, wow! It knew what... [chuckles]

Steven Bartlett 1:56:29 Yeah. It knew what I wanted to hear 'cause I've probably went through the World Cup, and I've-

Jonathan Haidt 1:56:32 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:56:33 And then I realized, okay, so this is not reality. This is-

Jonathan Haidt 1:56:35 Wow

Steven Bartlett 1:56:35 ... it's a curated version of reality that, in some sense, is trying to please me or to retain me in some way. And, of course, once the advertising model kicks in, retention becomes the, the great incentive. What do you think-

Speaker 1:56:47 ... It's called psychophancy, by the way.

Steven Bartlett 1:56:49 Yeah, I just learned that word, 'cause [chuckles] -

Speaker 1:56:50 It's like extreme-- It's like agreeableness at scale. It's like golden retriever energy.

Steven Bartlett 1:56:54 Like kissing your ass, as a-

Speaker 1:56:55 Yeah.

Speaker 1:56:55 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:56:55 Professional kissing your ass.

Speaker 1:56:56 The yes man.

Steven Bartlett 1:56:56 What do you think of these AI C- CEOs? 'Cause they-- it feels like they're in a bit of a race.

Speaker 1:57:02 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:57:02 Where if, you know, if they don't do it, then a national rival's gonna do it. If a n- national rival doesn't g-- doesn't take them out, China's gonna do it. And I, I, this is-- we've see-- we kind of saw it with social media. H- how can they stop? Because if, if they stop-

Speaker 1:57:18 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:57:18 ... you know, they might say that there, there's an existential risk.

Speaker 1:57:21 There is like a build the plane as you're flying it. And I think you, on one of your episodes, you know that I'm a fan of this show, and I actively listen to this, as I've told you this many times. One of the-- I think you had said on one of your episodes, right, that you have a friend who is very close to a AI founder, and-

Steven Bartlett 1:57:38 I said this, yes.

Speaker 1:57:38 Yeah, and in public, the founder says all the right things, and then behind closed doors-

Steven Bartlett 1:57:42 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:57:42 ... it's altogether different.

Steven Bartlett 1:57:43 Yeah, it was, it was a horrifying thing, and I said this, and the clip went viral, and people have been trying to hazard a guess who it was. I c- I shouldn't say who it was because, uh, it's a- it's Chinese whispers at the end of the day. It's someone that I'm very good friends with, who is verified, spends time with one of the biggest founders of an AI company in the world, and I k- he was with him two weeks ago again. And he said to me that they're very aware that there's a small existential risk for humanity. And-

Speaker 1:58:10 That's what they say-

Speaker 1:58:11 It's not small.

Speaker 1:58:11 Publicly, they say it's small.

Speaker 1:58:13 It's not-

Speaker 1:58:13 Privately, they say it's big.

Steven Bartlett 1:58:14 I mean, but even if there w-- it was one percent-

Speaker 1:58:17 It's a lot more than one percent, they say.

Steven Bartlett 1:58:19 I- if it was... But I'm saying even if-

Speaker 1:58:20 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:58:21 ... it w- if it was zero point one percent, if there was, if there was anything that I was doing in my life where there was a zero point one percent chance that I might wipe out everybody, [chuckles] I would immediately stop doing that thing.

Speaker 1:58:30 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:58:31 But, but these numbers are much bigger. I'm hearing seven percent, twenty percent, twenty-five percent, depending on who you-- And I think acceleration in this direction increases that percentage.

Speaker 1:58:41 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:58:42 What do you think of these people? Like, what, what's going on here?

Speaker 1:58:44 Let's start with the, the collective action problems, uh, because each, each company is competing with the other companies, and so they feel like they have to go faster. Uh, and we know this, you know, OpenAI has pushed some products out before they did safety testing because they had to get to market by a certain date. So just the normal business environment p- puts them all in a collective action problem against each other. And then they all say: "We're in a collective action problem against China, 'cause if we don't do this, then China will." Now, one thing I learned, again, I don't know if Tristan said this on your podcast or whether it was on his podcast, um, but is that China is focused on using AI to make its economy more efficient, to make manufacturing better and cheaper. They are using these applications, which we've talked about before, like we're totally-- there's lots of great applications of AI. The Chinese also have so many spies in America and in the tech companies, and they can hack into anything. So the point is, the faster o- our companies are, are in a headlong race to create AGI, to create a country of geniuses that can replace all human workers, put us all out of work, and run-- it can run everything. They're in a race to create that, and one of the arguments is, if we don't do it, China will. But what I understood from listening to Tristan and from his conversation with you, is that the faster we go towards AGI, the faster China goes, 'cause they just, they just take all our discoveries. So can't we slow down on the race to AGI and do more safety testing? Um, you know what? We all saw with MultiBook and, you know, communities of agents who are talking to each other and making up languages, and even if part of that was human-driven now, in a year, it, it's gonna be much more than, than what we saw. So I think the, the risks are extraordinary. I think that some of these guys-- look, they've been in AI for a long time. Uh, they might not have realized the existential risk they were putting us all in ten, fifteen years ago, and now they can't stop. They can't pull the plug. They can't say: "Oh, let's shut down the whole business." So it is a very, very risky time, and, um, I think Dario Amodei, I just read his long essay on the adolescence of technology. At least you get the feeling he's really wrestling with it, and he's-- I think he'll-- I think he's more open than some of the others, but I don't know.

Speaker 2:00:49 But when has morality ever been-

Speaker 2:00:51 Yeah. [chuckles]

Speaker 2:00:52 ... top of m- top of mind for a tech leader? You might be thinking, "If there's point one one one percent chance, I'm not gonna do it." That's what I think as a doctor. That's what you think as a social scientist.

Speaker 2:01:01 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2:01:01 But we're not AI leaders, right?

Steven Bartlett 2:01:04 Yeah. It's one of the great question marks I just can't seem to get an answer to. And, and then you've got this whole robotics thing happening-

Speaker 2:01:11 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 2:01:11 ... where Elon's got his Optimus robots, and there's gonna be a billion-- uh, he says there's gonna be ten billion of them at one point, but I think his pay packet requires a million of them to be out in the world.

Speaker 2:01:21 For him to make a trillion dollars, yeah.

Steven Bartlett 2:01:23 Yeah, and I just saw, yeah, AI, robotics, you combine the two-

Speaker 2:01:26 Yeah, you get Terminator.

Steven Bartlett 2:01:27 Yeah. [laughing]

Speaker 2:01:29 [laughing]

Speaker 2:01:30 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 2:01:30 We laugh, but it's like-

Speaker 2:01:31 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 2:01:33 ... should we s- stop for a second and maybe have a conversation about this?

Speaker 2:01:37 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 2:01:37 Can we?

Speaker 2:01:38 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 2:01:38 With commercial incentives in play, it does feel like, uh... I don't feel hopeful.

Speaker 2:01:44 Yeah. It's very hard to know how to stop it. Um, but I just-- I want to just add one, one point on here, which we've touched around a, a, a few times, and the robotics will really bring it home here, um, is the, the, the loss of the sense of meaning or purpose that many people are feeling, but especially young people. The saddest graph in The Anxious Generation-- all the graphs look the same. It's all a hockey stick. It's all like nothing was happening, uh, you know, '90s to twenty ten, twenty eleven, then all of a sudden, something happens. And the saddest one is the one, "My life feels meaningless." Um, do you agree with that? Disagree with it? And the percent that agree, uh, I think it's, you know, something like eight or nine percent, uh, you know, agreed for the millennial generation. I think it's in chapter seven, the end of chapter seven. And then it's sort of fairly flat, and then all of a sudden, we hit this period, the Great Rewiring, twenty ten to twenty fifteen. Uh, so right around twenty thirteen, it goes way, way up. Um, young people feel useless, and I think the reason is that they are useless. What I mean is, people need to feel useful. People need to do things for other people. That's how you feel useful. If, if you were to disappear, would the world change? If yes, you're useful.... Are, are people depending on you for something? If yes, you're useful. So if, i- if kids are doing errands for the family, they're useful. But as childhood changed from a mix of things to just consuming content, if that's all you do, and five hours a day is the average for social media, eight to ten on, on devices, not counting school. If all you're doing is just you're just consuming content, you are useless. Now, what's happening? The chance to have a job where you actually do something for people, you know, you know, it, it used to be if you work in a store, at least you're helping people buy something, and you might talk to them, and now you're just there watching as they use the machine. The more technology makes things easy and cheap by replacing people, the more people will feel: my job is to just... I don't have a job, it's just consume content. The AI guys tell us, "Oh, such abundance! Oh, my God, it's going to be such abundance. No one will have to work. We'll give everyone UBI. We'll give everybody, you know, universal basic income." That is hell on earth. What's going to happen? Certainly, all the boy-- most of the boys, it's just going to be video games, porn, and gambling. So i- if you, if you simply give people money to do nothing, you guaranteed they're going to feel useless, and then the suicide rate will continue to go up. So this is the world that the AI guys are taking us to, a world in which there's nothing left for people to do. Um, they say that they will give up some of their trillions and, uh, somehow let it be taxed or diverted as UBI, but that's never happened before, so it's not likely to happen in this case. So again, I don't know what to do, but we've got to start showing that we can do something, and we've got to be talking about this, and we can't be welcoming AI in everywhere. We've got to be wary and vigilant. Yes, there are some uses, but Silicon Valley has tricked us so many times and enshittified so many of the apps that we use. We have to expect that the same is going to happen with our beloved chatbots and our beloved ChatGPT.

Steven Bartlett 2:04:43 This graph on page one hundred and ninety-five of your book, um, which is titled: Life Often Feels Meaningless, and it's, it's the graph you mentioned, I'll throw it up on the screen, is shocking. It's shocking just to look at. Suddenly, there's this huge spike in meaninglessness amongst high school seniors.

Speaker 2:05:02 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 2:05:03 What is it to live a meaningful life? What does that mean?

Speaker 2:05:07 Yeah. So my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, addresses that question very directly. Um, and the first hypothesis you might have about happiness is it comes from getting what you want. You know, you set out on a goal, you get your goal, you're happy. It's very short-lived. You're happy very briefly, and then you, you move on to the next thing. The more sophisticated happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from within, and this is what the ancients tell us, East and West, Buddhist, Stoic. "Don't try to make the world conform. You change yourself. Be-- accept the world the way it is." That's better, but what I-- the conclusion I came to as a, as a modern social psychologist working in positive psychology, was that the best way to say it is that happiness comes from between. What I mean by that is humans evolved as a, a, a almost hivish creatures. We evolved in intensely social groups, never being alone, lots of gossip, lots of conflict, always, uh, intensely social, and modernity has made it possible for us to not live that way. We've come apart. There are many advantages to that, but we feel we're, we're missing something. We're, we're, we're lonely. We feel something is not right. And so the conclusion I came to is that happiness comes... A, a sense of a, a, a full, satisfying, meaningful life comes when you get three betweens right: the relationship between yourself and others; love, broadly speaking, not just romantic, but friends, family; um, yourself and your work, that as humans need to be productive, we need to be doing something that matters, that, that affects other people; and, uh, the relationship between you and something larger than yourself. We need to be part of something that endures, that, uh, a part of a tradition, part of we can look to the-- look to a future. What I do matters for this group or this mission, or me as an academic, I feel like I'm connected all the way back to Plato, and I hope all the way forward in time to, to future, future psychologists and future scholars. So if you get those three right, then you will be as happy as you can be. You'll be as happy as your genes and childhood allow you to be. And when you put it that way, what we can see is social media and AI interfere with all three. So relationship between yourself and others, well, you know, social media f-- gives you lots and lots of shallow relationships, which blocks out. You don't have time for your, for real people. So the technology is blocking relation between ourselves and others and taking it over. Ourself and our work, [chuckles] work is going to be taken over by the machines, uh, and it's already becoming more soulless and isolated. And then yourself and something larger than yourself. Humans have to live in a moral matrix. We, we co-create a, a set of meanings and traditions. We need a sense of history, of who we are, where we came from. All that's getting shredded. Everything is just little bits. People don't read books. Imagine if all of the accumulated wisdom of humanity in books is just gone, just gone. Nobody's going to read... Pe- people, young people are not reading books. It's very hard for them to read a book now because of the attention. So if we lose a sense of history, if we lose, uh, an ability to, to co-construct reality, then it'll be hard to imagine anything that we're connected to larger than ourselves. So I'm-- I am a techno-determinist in the sense that I think the tech-- it doesn't determine everything, but that you, you have to start with the technology, because that changes the ground upon which we live, the g- the, the, the zone in which we're trying to construct meaningful lives. Start with that, and then you can see what the obstacles are. And that's why I take a much more, uh, well, intemperate, I guess. Uh, [chuckles] I'll, I'll accept the word, um-

Speaker 2:08:39 I love it

Speaker 2:08:39 ... because I think we don't-- because we don't have much time here. We have to reclaim life in the real world for our kids and for ourselves. There is no way to find a happy, meaningful life if we make the full transition to the online AI robot world.

Steven Bartlett 2:08:53 And what, in your m-

Speaker 2:08:55 ... perspective is a meaningful life, and how does it differ for Jon-- from Jonathan's?

Speaker 2:09:00 I loved Jonathan's description. It was so beautiful. The-- I have given a prescription to patients of what creates a meaningful life, and it is to live a lifetime in a day. And so that sounds like this big thing, but all it is, is that, you know, when you start your day, think about five things, five things that you can do in your day to create an arc of a long and meaningful life in one day. So what does that mean? Spend a little bit of time in childhood-

Speaker 2:09:29 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2:09:29 So in wonder and play.

Speaker 2:09:31 Mm.

Speaker 2:09:31 Even if it's for a few minutes, do something that brings you joy for joy's sake. Spend a little bit of time in work. We all know what that is, and for most of us, it's a lot of time, but for... You know, it doesn't have to be paid work, but just something that helps you feel a sense of productivity, agency, that, "I can do difficult things, and I can overcome." Spend a few minutes in solitude, very important for all of the reasons that we've talked about today. Spend some time in community, so engaging with others, and then spend some time in retirement or in reflection-

Speaker 2:10:03 Oh, wow!

Speaker 2:10:03 ... really taking stock of your day. So at the end of the day, when you're going to bed and you're putting your head on your pillow, you can say, "Okay, yes, I lived a meaningful life. I did all of those things." And so if you do a little bit of that every day, you can make a difference. And the reason I give that prescription, because I've had patients who-- you know, guitar players, right?

Speaker 2:10:21 Mm.

Speaker 2:10:21 So people who love playing the guitar, and they don't play the guitar all week, and they'll say to me... I don't see patients currently, but they've said to me, "Oh, you know, no, Doc, I, I..." I said: "What do you like to do for fun?" "Oh, I like playing guitar, but I don't play it." "When do you play?" "Oh, I don't know, once a month, once every three months." And I'm like: "Do you have a guitar at home?"

Speaker 2:10:37 Mm.

Speaker 2:10:37 "I have a guitar at home. Too much happening, work and family life, et cetera." So then I said, "Well, why don't you just play your guitar-

Speaker 2:10:44 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Speaker 2:10:44 ... a little bit every day, you know?" Because it's that all-or-nothing fallacy.

Speaker 2:10:47 Right.

Speaker 2:10:47 It's like, "If I don't have an hour to play guitar, I'm not gonna do it." But the joy that it can bring you, that meaning and purpose, it's tremendous. So I think, you know, that's what I use, live a lifetime in a day, and the reason is because there are two distinct-- When you look at how your brain and body react to happiness, there's two distinct k- types of happiness, and so there's hedonic happiness and eudaimonic happiness. Hedonic happiness is all about what we've talked about: social media, consumption, pleasure. And the other type is eudaimonic happiness: meaning, purpose, connection, community, growth-oriented activities. And so in-- when you live a lifetime in a day, you go towards that eudaimonia, which can then help you and overcome that hedonic. Because in your brain, there's something called the hedonic treadmill, and the treadmill is a thing in your brain where no matter what you do, this is like the Instagram lifestyle, right? No matter what happens, you need more of it. You need more of it. Same thing with brain rot, and that is because that you can never get enough, and it's, um, the hedonic treadmill, but you do not have a treadmill for eudaimonic happiness.

Speaker 2:11:54 Mm. Could I-- That, that is really beautiful. I've never heard an approach like that, but it, it, it sort of takes you... It, it gives you a much, a bigger view of your day, live a lifetime in a day. If I was gonna offer some specific advice, first, I'll offer advice to parents. Um, here's the rule. So I did a really good job keeping my kids off social media, but I didn't pay enough attention to computers and everything else because it was during COVID. The rule I wish I had followed, I recommend to all parents, especially with younger children, is: have the clear rule, no devices in the bedroom, no screens in the bedroom, ever. That's just our family rule. We have a TV in the living room. We have a computer. You can sometimes use those, but we never take screens into the bedroom, at least for kids. You know, maybe later on you'll have to relent. In middle school, they'll have so much homework, they can take the laptop in, and maybe you're-- if you live in a small apartment, of course, it's difficult. But if you can afford to do that, to, to have that rule, that's the main rule I wish I had done in my family, and that will make everything a lot easier. Also, same thing at the dinner table, no device. We don't have screens at the dinner table. So that's, that's a specific thing for parents to do. Um, for everyone else, for everyone, for just all adults, the advice is, you have to reclaim your attention because your attention has been largely taken from you, at least a lot of it has. You have to reclaim it. And here are the three things that I, that I do with my students, and you can do it very quickly, and I can just explain it. The first is you have to get your morning and evening routine right. The great majority, as soon as they open their eyes, they're on their phone, and it's the last thing, and it's everything in between. So you have to have a good morning routine. What, what are the first seven things you want to do after you open your eyes? And, uh, at, at a certain point, you can check your phone, but it shouldn't be in the first view. Um, do things to set up your own day. Otherwise, your day will be taken by your phone. It'll be controlled by your phone. So you've got to reclaim your morning and your evening. That's step one. Step two, um, you have to shut off almost all notifications. Go into your notifications, look at, uh, into your settings. What's giving you all the notifications? Most of my students get an alert every time they get an email.

Speaker 2:13:53 Mm.

Speaker 2:13:54 They don't understand that they have to-- you know, because they don't want to miss anything, but they don't understand that if you are always being alerted, then you miss everything else. So shut off alerts for almost everything. Obviously, Uber and Lyft, you want to keep on. You want to know when the car is coming. But news outlets, everything else, get, get a daily email. Don't get alerts when... And then the third, as, as I said before, is get rid of all the slot-machine apps. Whatever apps you habitually use, whatever apps you feel compulsion towards, you have to get it off your phone, and in that way, your phone is no longer a dopamine trigger that's gonna always call out to you like an addictive product. Do those three things, you'll reclaim a lot of your attention.

Speaker 2:14:28 I would add, stop, breathe, be, that you mentioned.

Speaker 2:14:30 Stop, breathe, be.

Speaker 2:14:32 It's a 3-second brain reset.

Speaker 2:14:33 Okay.

Speaker 2:14:33 So you-- before you check your devices, before you engage, stop-... breathe and be. Ground yourself in the present moment. What it does is it decreases that what if future-focused thinking. You know, anxiety is a future-focused emotion, and it gets you back into the here-

Steven Bartlett 2:14:50 Mm

Speaker 2:14:50 -and the now. And so maybe the compulsion, you know, you're bored, you're checking. What about doing something else? You're-- you know, you, you-- we often use that checking as a substitute for many things, and so it gives you that opportunity. And then the rule of two is something that we haven't talked about, which I would love to propose to, uh, us today, is that your brain can really only handle two new changes at a time. And so give yourself two things. Of all of the things that we've talked about-

Steven Bartlett 2:15:16 Mm

Speaker 2:15:16 -if you want to try in your life, two at a time, give yourself eight weeks, and then-

Steven Bartlett 2:15:20 Mm

Speaker 2:15:20 -add two more and two more. This is why New Year's resolutions fail, because we try to do everything all at once, and so just stepwise, two at a time.

Steven Bartlett 2:15:28 Jonathan, you've just written this book, which is now out, called The Amazing Generation, and it's beautiful. Beautiful illustrations. I'm assuming this one is for slightly younger audiences.

Speaker 2:15:41 It's for ages eight to thirteen, yes.

Steven Bartlett 2:15:42 And who should buy this, and who should they buy it for?

Speaker 2:15:44 It turns out that k- uh, kids eight through eighty actually love it. Even adults, they're buying it for their kids. But because it kind of lays out the basic ideas of the, of the anxious generation and explains dopamine, it explains the business model. Uh, but it does it in a really fun way, and it's working beyond our wildest dreams. If you look at the Amazon reviews, it's full of parents who said: "I left it on the kitchen table. My kids came home, they grabbed it, they fought over it, they read it. They each read it in the, in the first couple of days, and then they said, 'Mom, when I go to middle school, I don't want a smartphone. Just give me a p- give me a flip phone. Give me a basic phone.'" Because the book is about how to be a rebel. It's about how to reject this control that the company's trying to put on you and how to live a life that you choose, full of real freedom, friendship, and fun.

Steven Bartlett 2:16:31 And also The 5 Resets, which is a book we talked about before on this show. Rewire your brain and body for less stress and more resilience. Another smash hit bestseller that everybody's been talking about. Who's it for?

Speaker 2:16:41 It is for anyone who is struggling with stress, overwhelm, and burnout. It's to help you feel a sense of calm and clarity in this anxious, uncertain world. Everything is free, so that's something that's really important to me as a doctor. Every suggestion I ever offer will always be cost-free because I think about patients with varying resources. It's all science-backed, and it's totally practical. You don't have to go to Bali and have a sabbatical.

Steven Bartlett 2:17:08 [chuckles]

Speaker 2:17:08 You can rewire your brain today, right now, in the midst of all of this chaos.

Steven Bartlett 2:17:12 Thank you to both of you. I've learned so much, and I really, really mean that. Like, I've, I've-- I feel sufficiently pushed to take change, [chuckles] to make change in my life. And I need to go think about this because, um, I am, uh, most certainly struggling with my addiction to my phone, and I can feel it hurting my relationships, especially now as a fiancé. My girlfriend talks to me-- My fiancé talks to me about it all the time, and I want to be present. I want to be present for my kids when I have my kids, and I'm slightly concerned right now that I won't be unless I take some kind of drastic action, um, in the direction of getting my attention back and reclaiming it. Thank you so much for the work that both of you do. I can't say it enough because it's so important, and you've reached so many millions of people, and you're, you're both changing the world in a really-- in a way that my words would not be able to capture. Um, but just thank you, and please keep going. And if there's anything more that I can do to support both of your causes, um, please do let me know what they are. And on behalf of all of my, you know, many millions of people that are with us right now, um, thank you so much for saving our children.

Speaker 2:18:11 Thank you, Steven. Thank you for giving the world so many opportunities to accommodate and create new mental structures.

Speaker 2:18:17 It's always such a pleasure to join you, Steven, and truly, I feel like you are changing the world as well.

Speaker 2:18:24 Thank you.

Steven Bartlett 2:18:25 We're done. Thank you. YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what video you would like to watch next based on AI and all of your viewing behavior. And the algorithm says that this video is the perfect video for you. It's different for everybody looking right now. Check this video out, and I bet you, you might love it.