 and welcome to the Davis-Pairing University lecture series. We'd like to welcome to the stage tonight our moderator, a former news anchor for KCRA TV, currently the communications director at UC Davis School of Law, and a contributing host for the Capitol Public Radio, our dear friend, the one and only Miss Pamela Boone. Welcome to the spring lecture of the Davis-Pairing University, which is now incredibly in its seventh year. I'm always thrilled and honored to be here. These presentations always deliver information that is cutting edge, useful, and this time could save lives. A Deadly Wandering is the best-selling book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, Matt Rickdahl. It leaves the science of attention with the wrenching story of a car accident that killed two rocket scientists, an accident caused by distracted driving. Reggie Shaw, the young man behind the wheel, later said, I used my phone when I drove all the time. To me, that was just driving. So many adults and teens behaved the same way. In recent days, knowing that I would be addressing you here tonight, I've been counting how many people I see texting or looking at their phones in the car. I look around and stop to the stoplight and observe. And then one day when I had done a pretty fair amount of driving, I stopped counting when I got to 30. We usually don't have many kids in the audience at our events, only parents, but I'm happy to see that there are some teenagers here with us tonight. If we can keep even one person, a teen or an adult, from engaging with their phone while driving, it will have been worth it. Now, the reviews for this book, A Deadly Wandering, have been nothing short of spectacular. The New York Times book review praised it, saying, it deserves a spot next to fast food nation and to kill a mockingbird in American high school curriculums. To say that it may save lives is self-evident. The Christian Science Monitor called it, keen and elegantly raw, not just a morality tale about texting and driving, but also a probe sent into the world of technology, examining the way that it's outstripping our capability to keep up with it. And how we as a culture are feeding bullets into the techno gun and playing with it. The book asks difficult questions that forces us to ask while we can't resist the pull of the phone even when we know better. Rickle writes, I'm trying to better understand why two rocket scientists are dead. Was it because Reggie for some reason lost his focus? Was he distracted? What was happening inside his brain? Can research being done by a new generation of neuroscientists prevent similar tragedy? More basically, what is attention? Now that I have your attention, I would like to first thank DPUs, business and community sponsors before we bring our keynoter to the stage. Let's start with Davis Media Access, which records all the DPU lectures and uploads them to the DNA website for the many who cannot attend. Let's have a round of applause here. Also the Adam Reader, which donates 10% of the author's book sales to DPU. Suzanne Himmel of First Real Estate, Rose Cholowinsky of Swim America, Golden One Credit Union, John Newman of Hallmark and UC Davis, and Ashley and Nancy Hughes. And now for the main program. We're going to begin with a 45 to 50 minute talk by Matt Rickle, a 20 minute Q&A followed by a book signing in the front foyer, and then a nine o'clock house close. If you have a burning question during or after the keynote, just jot down the question on the index card that you should have received when you first entered the theater. The cards are going to be collected immediately following the talk. Also, thank you as well to the many of you who emailed questions ahead of the lecture or going to try to get in as many of your questions as possible. Now it is my honor to introduce tonight's keynote speaker, Matt Rickle. This best-selling author and New York Times reporter has covered a range of issues, including the impact of technology in our lives. In 2010, he won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series of articles that exposed the pervasive risks of distracted driving and its root causes. Importantly, that word led to widespread reform. The nonfiction thriller, A Deadly Wandering, explored these issues. It was a New York Times bestseller and was named the best book of 2014 by various publications. It is the true story of a deadly, mysterious car crash that leads to a landmark investigation into what technology is doing to our brains. Rickle is also the author of the plain thrillers most recently in the doomsday equation. He is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and UC Berkeley, although we won't hold that against him. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two children and we are so glad that he brave the traffic on interstate 82 appear at Davis Perry University tonight. Please join me in welcoming to the stage author, Matt Brinzel. Listen, thank you. I'd like to tell you a quick story about a different book, A Deadly Wandering, although I will get to that shortly. It's a story about, it's a story about, I'm just gonna move over here. Can you guys hear me okay with the, yeah. My first book was called Hooked and it came out in 2007. It was, it was a thriller. And a friend of mine went to Barnes & Noble and he saw the book on a front table, you know those front tables at the bookstore. It was their sandwich between a Superman anthology and a book by Marjah Stewart. So this friend of mine is, he's excited. It's my first book, his friend's first book. He takes out his camera phone to take a picture of it and from behind the counter, the clerk walks out. He says, excuse me sir, I was wondering what you were doing. And my friend said, oh, I'm taking a picture of my friend's book. And the guy from behind the counter says, you gotta be kidding me. You're friends with Marjah Stewart? This is my way of saying, first of all, I am merely a journalist described with a pen and a notebook. I am not a celebrity like Marjah Stewart to get you to have me here tonight. If you came looking for a souffle recipe, I apologize. I also in particular want to thank Christy Fries and Jody Lieberman and the DPU committee for having me here and actually could all of you stand because I want to mention something about this room. But all of the members, I also have to remark, none of these ladies is Marjah Stewart. I hope you're not doubly disappointed. All right, look, let's move from the mild humor to are you prepared to be journalistically grilled? Yeah, okay. It's a little hard for me to see, but I'm gonna ask for a show of hands of who here has ever been in a bad relationship? Did someone here not tell you the truth? I don't know the truth. Anyone here currently in a bad relationship has one in which you think in the moment that it's mutually beneficial, that it's serving you only to discover later, maybe years later, that you were taken advantage of in ways that you were completely blind to at the time. I want to posit to you tonight that each and every one of you, every one of you, to a person, is in a bad relationship with your phone. I'm not gonna merely posit this, I'm not gonna theorize it. This is not gonna be filled with platitudes. I'm going to prove to you with neuroscience that you are in a bad relationship with your phone. One, someone who knows one word, not a client. I've always tempted to pause before I start the talk and say, get in your last last text. So I'm gonna prove it to you tonight that you're in a bad relationship with your phone the way I've just defined it. It's gonna be a relationship that at this moment, I think that you think is one thing. It is a relationship that's pretty even-handed. It's a relationship where you are getting a lot of things that you might define as productivity, communication, entertainment. I am hopeful and I expect that after the next 45 minutes or so of neuroscience and some Q and A, you are gonna realize that it's a much worse relationship than you think right now. It's not gonna take you a few years like your high school relationship to look back and say that wasn't so great. An hour from now, we're gonna say, this relationship is based on things other than what I thought. My phone is something other than what I thought. But in order to get us there, I wanna start by going back into the call. The relationship I'm talking about goes far beyond it. It goes into your living room and into your relationship, into your work room, your board room. But I wanna start the call and I wanna do it for a reason that will become clear and I wanna do it by virtue of telling you just briefly and showing you about the young man and his tragedy that Pam alluded to earlier. This is Reggie Shaw. There's something I want you to notice about Reggie that you probably already heard. Reggie has terrifically kind eyes. Reggie is a very, very nice young man. As I got to know Reggie, I thought, that's the kind of guy I wanted to be friends with in high school. He's the kind of guy that moms wanted their daughters to date and that teachers really appreciated. He was 19 years old on September 22, 2006. And he was driving to work that morning in a Chevy Tado at 6.30 in the morning across this Bairdott Valley in northern Utah. Picture a winding road going through hills, 55 miles an hour, despite the fact that it's the last day of summer. It's already starting to rain. It's freezing rain. It's dark out. Behind Reggie is a guy named John Kaiser. John Kaiser was a certified barrier. Actually, in Davis you may well know the term. I didn't know it until I started working on the story. He's a certified horseshoe maker. So it explains why he is carrying, with his truck, a trailer of two tons of horseshoes and horseshoe making equipment. This is a missile of highway speeds. John Kaiser is noticing that Reggie is occasionally going across the yellow department. I asked John what he thought later on. He's kind of a soft-spoken, little stoic guy, handle bar, less dash, works on his forearm. He said to me, and I quote, I felt to myself, this guy's gonna cause a salsa. Coming out of the direction that morning are Jim Fafaro and Keith O'Dell. They're in a Saturday. Pam mentioned that they're rocket scientists. Not a cliche in this case. Genuine, bona fide rocket scientists. They are building the booster for the next space shuttle. They're commuting to work. One of them's eating a Fuji apple, his wife gave him. The other one, munching on some Cheerios from the Ziploc bag. The last time that Reggie crosses the yellow divider, he clips the Saturn coming the other direction. They spin out of control. This is what it looked like when John Kaiser hit him. This is what it looked like when John Kaiser hit him. This is their Saturn. You'll forgive me for being a little bit grotesque, but I think it bears mention. Not only did the men down on arrival let the, sorry, dead in the moment, down on impact, but the collision is so violent they have to search for their idols. Hundred down yards down the road, Reggie stops in the Shenitaho, which is virtually unscathed. He is unhurried, says, I have no idea what happened. Maybe I, maybe I hide your point. Maybe they came into my hand. Bart Wendell's locker's one of the first officers to show up for the scene. He's one tough guy. Just back from my wrapper and snipped up, snipped out from both side of the arms. He takes Reggie to the hospital and he notices that as he's driving Reggie to the hospital to get a drug and alcohol test, mandatory and a fatality, that Reggie starts to text with one hand and Bart says to me, I realize at that moment, this guy was a one hander. I'll cut to the chase. Months long investigation follows it becomes an extraordinary who done it. A veritable law in order meets a digital crime discovers that Reggie had been texting 11 times in the minutes and seconds around the record. So an innocuous stuff that couldn't even remember to a young woman that he sort of started dating. Put a fine point on it. Why am I mentioning this? Well, let's just get to the facts really quick about texting and driving before we move beyond it. Before I take you inside Reggie's brain and inside your own brain, when you're interacting with the device in the car and outside of the car, we're gonna laser inside his brain. We're gonna move inside of it. Let's just talk for a second, 23 times, I'm sure you've heard these stats, greater risk of crash or beer crash when you're texting. Four times greater risk of crash when you're talking on the phone, whether or not that's hands-free, we'll talk about why that is later. Look, since 2006, when this accident happened, we have all come to agree. When I say all, 84.4% of the texting and driving is completely unacceptable. Just give me a show of hands. Would you pretend you agree with that statement? Okay, forgive this turn of phrase. I don't mean that as no means. So that's what monkeys say. Here's what monkey do. 36% of red attacks were emailed the last 30 days while driving 27% of set time. I want you to look at those numbers. 36% let's just seize on that. The year's 90 is 2004. So, since 2006, all these laws have been passed, all this public awareness. Here's the punchline. 36% in 2004, that is up from 2012. All the laws, 46 states. Public awareness campaigns all the time. The number has gone up. I want you to seize on this word, disconnect. This is a massive, profound disconnect between professed attitudes and actual behaviors. As I thought about this disconnect, getting up, getting bigger, not small. I can only think of one parallel in public health that is so profound as this disconnect between professed attitudes and behaviors. I know it's a big crowd. Anybody want to take a shot and shout out with that ID? Who ya, who said that? Smoking. Almost everyone you talk to, I've spent a year doing stories on electronic cigarettes. Talked to a lot of smokers. To a person they will tell you, this will kill me. This is a very bad idea. Why do they do it? Addiction. I'm gonna stop short tonight of making the case while we talk about your relationship with your phone that you are addicted. It's a very big clinical word, but I'm gonna move you toward the notion that in your relationship with your device, you are experiencing compulsion and habituation that borders on addiction. It is not a conviction in the clinical sense, but it is nearing that place. So, I just want to add that those are the, those are the tweeting numbers. These are the other things people are doing that have a wheel now. 27% of drivers, age 16 to 65, report using Facebook. 14%, report using Twitter. 10% taking send videos. This is the one that closed strikes me. 17% takes selfies. Nothing could be a more salient metaphor for what we're talking about. Thinking of your cell at the expense of all others. Okay, so now, let's take a travel inside Reg's brain, inside your brain, so that we can try to determine, we can try to figure out how is it that in spite of all this awareness and these laws, the disconnect continues to grow? To do this, I would like to ask you to go on a journey for me. It's a journey back in time. I want everyone to channel their inner cave person. I want you to picture that you are a cave person sitting in front of a pipe. Now, I have a suggestion for those of you who are feeling like you may have trouble doing this. You ready? Make sure yourself just a lot airy. All right, you got it? You're tending to a fire. We're gonna travel inside Reg's brain and inside your brain. You're tending to the fire. This is my fire. You get a tap on the shoulder from behind. Can you ignore the tap on the shoulder from behind? Why not? You don't know if it's opportunity or threat. Is it someone with a spear? Is it a potential bait? Is it someone with food? Is it someone saying lava? Is it the roar of a lion rather than a tap on the shoulder? Of course you can't ignore that tap on the shoulder. Now, shed your fur, your cave person's fur. Picture yourself again behind, now behind the wheel. You're tending to drive it. Your phone ranks. This is a proverbial tap on the shoulder from anyone anywhere in the world. Is it opportunity? Is it threat? Is it someone telling you to ask you to pick up some milk on the way home? Is it your boss? Is it your spouse? Is it your child? Is it a friend? All of these things act like a proverbial tap on the shoulder. They are very, very alluring and I'm gonna show you why by taking you inside your brain. Look. When you're tending to the fire, when you're focused on something that requires attention, it takes up this part of your brain. Broadly speaking, it's the prefrontal cortex, the frontal lobe of your brain. It is the most of all part of the human species. It is responsible for architecture, civilization, literature. I wasn't gonna add politics, but these days that might be something about your brain's death. This is responsible for attention and focus, executive control. But, but, when you get a tap on the shoulder from behind, the signal comes from here. These are parts of the brain that we share with much less of all animals. The brain's death. Survival areas of the brain. It sends a signal that says, war of a lion, run or die. It sends a signal that says, someone with a spirit, turn or perish. It sends a signal that says, potential may, turn or lose opportunity. It is a very powerful signal that for very good reason, not always, not always as you'll see tonight, but for very good reason it begins to hijack this. There are times we want to hijack this. There are times we do not want to hijack this. The first thing I want you to internalize tonight, I'm gonna make a kind of legalistic argument about your relationship with your phone and point one of it is to remember and think about the mechanical signal that's being sent from here to here. It's a very basic neurological primitive signal. Hijack this by this. Now, I always hesitate to show this slide for reasons that I'll explain in a minute. But before I do, I wanna explain why this effect, this mechanism can be even more pronounced than young people. It's because this, the prefrontal cortex here, it's amplified by the more maturing brain in the purple doesn't develop until you get older. So you're even more susceptible to that thing when you're younger. The reason I hesitate to mention it is that while it is worth bearing that in mind, this is not a problem, an issue, a mechanism that attends solely to young people. In fact, for the most part, this is something that affects all of us. It's worth knowing, it's worth knowing that for teens or if you are teens, that your kids, your grandkids may feel this to a greater extent, but we all feel it to a large extent. It's more so around the margins than it affects young people. Well, this is just, this is just really, this slide should be titled, the presenter has too much time to create power points. But this goes back to why we adhere to this, to the survival instinct of your circumstances because if you were gay person and you did look, you might have your face seen. So, okay, before I go on with the, I think that's the last of the slides where I had too much time, but it really would have been a lot of tap. Look, I want to pause before I get to the next three items. Reasons why your phone is not what you think, why it's so seductive, but before I do that, I'm wondering if Pam can come up and be humiliated for a second. You two face our phenomenal audience and as quickly as you might, recycle the letters A to I. Big round of applause. How about the numbers one to nine as fast as you can? The tricky part, you have to alternate as fast as you might, A, one, B, two, C, three, and so forth. All right, a big hand, seems like great people have such a kind introduction, I'm apologize. Look, I wanted to pause here because there may be some who think, even though we've been largely disabused of this notion the last few years, that you can truly honor two streams of information at once. Maybe you can listen to this and listen to this. The point of bringing Pam up for this basic exercise, so basic is it that we have been learning to count, to do A to I and one to nine since what, pre-k, they roll off our tongues, we can do it virtually in our sleep, but when asked to alternate, when asked to juggle these two streams of seemingly so elementary information, you watched that Pam's time and mine were two, any of us, well more than dollars. You cannot honor those streams of information, not these two streams, not two other streams of information, like your phone and the car, like your phone and your home. I mention that because I just want to make sure, if you could walk away from this and say, well, if I believed you could multitask, I wouldn't have to make a choice between these two streams. I wouldn't have to listen to this or this or this or my phone or some of the other choices I'm going to give you tonight. Clearly, it's true though. You cannot multitask. I want to show you by way of the video what happens to one young lady who tries to multitask her field. Tiffany, would you mind running the video? For two reasons. I show that for two reasons. One, to reinforce the driving keys, but two, to just show what happened. She had to make a choice. There was not honoring two streams of information. There was not doing A to I, one to nine. Okay, so now we've established two things in describing the new relationship with your phone. One is this mechanical thing, and two, you can't honor both streams at once. There's something else about your phone as it plays to your brain that makes it incredibly seductive in ways that go beyond its capabilities as a productivity and communications device. And that happens to do not with the mechanical nature of the information, but the kind of information that comes over the phone. It is social information. Less to doubt, these numbers get outdated by the day, but I won't bring them all off Snapchat. 700 million photos and videos per day up from 60 million in 2013. Tweets 500 million per day, and so on and so forth. Know this about these numbers. One is not replacing the next. They are complimenting each other. Now what's important about social information? What's so significant about this as pertains to the device in your brain? Let me take you back to the cave person for a second. What we know about social information is that it is so serious, so important, so crucial to our survival that if you talk to evolutionary biologists, they will tell you that they're not sure if it's a learned behavior or actually included on our DNA. And to show you this, I'll go back to our cave person. Let's say there's a friend, I've got a fellow cave person. He's sitting in front of the fire. He puts his hand in the fire and he burns it. And he gets an infection. This is long ago before antibiotics. If he can't tell me that burning the fire caused him to have an infection and made him sick enough, then I have to do the same thing. I have to learn it myself. There is no human species. We never propagate absent social information. It is so deeply in us that evolutionary biologists don't know whether it is learned at the most primitive level or it's actually included on our double helix. So now you've got a mechanical info pulse and you've got a device that's sending you information that by its nature is among the most alluring that you could possibly get. There's something else about that information. All right, trick question. If your phone gives you a lot of your relevant information, I'd be spammed. Does it make it more or less alluring? Show it to the answer for people who think. If you think your phone is less seductive or your computer, I use phone as a proxy, as a standing. Is your phone or computer more seductive, less seductive if you get a bunch of crime? Show it to the answer. Less seductive. This is one of the pieces of trivia I found most extraordinary as I was researching the book. It makes your phone more seductive. Here's why. Let's go back now as far as the cave person, the V.F. Skinner. Skinnerian psychology, I'm sure in this crowd many know of it. He did a basic bit of research. They call it putting a rat in a cage. There's a lever in the cage. The rat doesn't know which pressure the lever is going to bring food. It's random. So what is the rat incentivized to do? The rat is incentivized to press the lever all the time. Never knows when the good stuff's gonna come. It's one of the most powerful orders in all the psychology. It's called intermittent reinforcement. I think you'll forgive the comparison of us too. It's not really a comparison of us to roads because the iPhones haven't gotten that small where the phones don't go back to usually. But you take the point. Here's what the psychologists will call it. They'll call it a slot machine in your car. That's what the scientists say to you. You've seen driving through Reno, the one arm bandit in a cup of coins. Think about that occasionally when you see someone blasting their phone. Part of what they may be doing, part of what you may be doing, part of what I know I do sometimes is just wait for the good one. You need to be looking at the phone at that moment. We'll talk more about this in a second. Let me build up where we are. Mechanical, the hijack, social information, the fact that you get a lot of crud and it actually makes your device more seductive. Okay, there's one more that I wanna mention right now. You guys have heard of dopamine, the neurochemical. It's a pleasure, it's a reward chemical. It's associated with all kinds of wonderful things and some not so wonderful things. Food, achievement, it's a very powerful, very necessary, very valuable neurochemical. It can be not so valuable at times, like with cocaine or other drugs. The research I'm about to mention is a little more embryonic than what I've told you so far. I always wanna make that caveat. I've sort of internalized the New York Times' ethics and ethos of not going beyond what the facts will show. But what the facts will show is that there is early evidence, fledgling evidence, nascent evidence that suggests when you're interacting with your device, you're getting burst of dopamine. You're getting burst of reward. Here's the theory that the scientists have begun to develop around this. And you have the feeling that you're sort of just sitting there, you got your phone, maybe you're in a stoplight, maybe you're in a checkout aisle, maybe you're in the movie line, maybe you're sitting at dinner, and you start getting kind of the Jones to check your phone. Does that resonate with anybody? Just a random Jones in. Here's what some of the scientists think about when they discuss this. They say, you interact with your phone and you get a little burst of dopamine. You interact with your phone and you get it burst of dopamine. You interact with your phone again and you get a little burst of dopamine. You don't interact with your phone and you get a little bit bored. So what do you do? You go hunt out that feeling, that pleasure come out. It's the kind of cycle that is associated very much with evituation and compulsion and it can't be a self-associated with addiction. I wanna read to you a quote from a guy who teaches internet addiction in a major medical school, a graduate medical school. David Greenfield, University of Connecticut says, you see the computer, it's one trigger and you see it at the keyboard, it's another. You push the key, you get a result. There's a cascade of dopamine. It's the big coconut. It's in a sense an archive. The reason that I stopped short, incidentally, of using the term addictive is that, because this may well sound like addiction and you may well feel in your relationship with your phone that you've got some of those feelings that you would associate with addiction. I stopped short, personally, David Greenfield will quote it, but I stopped short because presently, the way scientists clinically define an addictive substance is when you can start to see changes in the brain. Like heroin, in fact, so controversial for one of the better words is this issue that there's some debate about whether even gambling is addictive because it's a behavior and not a substance. That's why I stopped short on that issue. One last thing, I'm gonna add to this. You may think, and I can imagine you would proceed from the way I've been describing this, that I'm talking about responding to your phone, that that's the nature of the relationship I'm describing. You may respond to your phone, but I'm really not, given this additional piece of information. What Harvard researchers realize is we get the same kind of dopamine release when we share personal information, the very kind of information we often share on our phones. Humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value in the same way as with other primary awards. So when you pick up your phone, you may be starting off the chain of dopamine. You may be sharing information that gives you a burst, and maybe if you're like me, I've noticed this in myself. Sometimes when I'm bored, I'll start a cascade of interactions because I know that each receipt, once I start something, I have to do for a receipt. Yeah, I wanna add it up for you. I wanna add up what we've described here. Tap on the shoulder, we are meant to be enforced with the social value, the dopamine sort, what's it equal? Okay, by California law, you cannot do a PowerPoint without a sentence slide. And oddly, the royalties go to George Lucas. I can't be great at all. All right, Pertuit is Star Wars. Look, let me tell you what, I'm showing this slide and I'll do it in a bit of a law-finding fashion. I wanna take you back, I want you to set everything aside and I wanna take you back in time to a different time, industrialization of food. This is a parallel that I wanna draw on you tonight when we talk about what's happening with our brains. When we industrialized food, it was by almost every measure a wonderful thing. More food to more people, more calories on trucks, automated in farms, into central locations and markets where people could eat, more people survive, more industry. On the whole terrific. There are some downsides that it has taken us almost this long to realize that are nearly as powerful or have the potential to be on the negative side as all the positives is on the industrialization of food. And I'm speaking here of junk food, of crud, of sugar, of fat that gets manufactured for us. Let me give you an example by way of the Dorita. I'm not thinking of the Dorita. Could be anything that Homer Simpson reaches for in there. Here's what's going on with the Dorita the way scientists have described it from there. It has a wonderful, it mimics a wonderful amount of sugar and fat. A wonderful amount that is if you have hiked through the jungle, gone into a cave, fought and killed a lowly mammoth and satisfied the amount of fat and sugar that is contained in that thing. It calls to a very primitive part of our brain and we've synthesized it. Now, you don't have to go kill a lowly mammoth. You need some quarters and a vending machine. This is what I think is going on today. What I think by virtue not of my own, you know, synthesis, but my own synthesis talking to many scientists about this subject. We own the technology today as we were once with the industrialization of food. There is so much extraordinary about technology. Make no mistake, this is not a screen against technology. By any stretch, all those things, all those attributes I mentioned earlier, they are all true. But we're beginning to realize that there are downsides, much in the same way that there are downsides for the industrialization of food. And I want to put it, I want to read you from an MDL professor who says the cell phone needs a deep need for social connection with a greater ease and greater potential detriment to do it in the same way that a vending machine that is right down the hall plays to our need for calories. What does this mean? It means that some of the mechanisms, some of the primitive mechanisms that have evolved over many, many years to serve us in the most extraordinary and beneficial ways that enable our survival, like social communication and like this taking over this, are being tapped into by this device. It has the capacity to hijack our brains the way junk food can hijack our taste buds even when it is ceased to serve us. There can be no greater example than behind the wheel. It divides all common sense. You are piloting a missile. But the reason why it's valuable to ground this conversation in the car is not just to make that point. It's because if we're doing it there, where else are we doing it? Where else are we being hijacked in ways where it is ceased to serve our stated purpose or the purpose that might best serve us, however we define it? I can't answer that for each and every one of you, but what I can begin to do is to talk to you about ways that you can understand the balance. That you can begin to define what for you, for you is junk food. And even begin to immediately identify spots where you're being hijacked and you don't realize it. Or being hijacked in ways that are taking a toll that is the neurological equivalent of a Dorito that you may not realize. So I'm gonna give you some answers about what to do and I'm gonna ground them also in neuroscience. Okay, you know how there's the, this is the first one, can I just ask how I'm doing on time? Is everybody asleep? I can't see it. It's my wife, how are we doing it? 10, 20, how long have I been in the afternoon? 40 minutes? Can you handle about 10 more minutes? Look, I'm gonna come back to the car again and tell you a little bit about it, but I just wanna talk about what you might do. Now that you've realized I hope that your phone is not merely all those things that you think it is, it is all those things. It is also something plain to you in very, very primitive ways that may actually be the real reason you're answering the phone. Not the reasons that you've told yourself. So what can you do? You know all those campaigns like take back the night or take back the White House or take back the capital? Are you ready? I have your mantra. I guess after you see it, you'll realize it. I got no business on Madison Avenue. Are you ready? This is your first mantra. Take that and check out I. Here's what I want you to do to just try to see what happens. I don't know about you, but I can hardly stand in the check out I anymore without checking my phone. These are little tiny moves. Tiny, tiny moments. I'm gonna give you the neuroscience in a minute, but I want you to think about the concept of taking back nickels and dimes of your attention. Why? There are a bunch of reasons for it I'll get into in the next few slides. But what happens when you are constantly interrupting? When you are constantly stimulated is that it affects no less than you're learning in memory. Every time you are stimulating yourself, you are taking up little bits, little bits of your neurological resources, your working memory, parts of your ability of your hippocampus to process information. And I'll give you an example by way, this goes along with, we talked about don't be a rat with the inner memory enforcement, don't be a rat refers to check out on a two. I want to give you a study that they did in UCSF just down the road, one of the premier research institutes. Extraordinary researcher, I don't know how he did this, but it's truly incredible. He studies the brain waves of a rat. And what he does is he takes a rat and puts a rat on, sorry, he introduces the rat to a new experience. In this case, he has the rat stand on a table the rat has never been on before. And the researcher, I don't remember his name, Lauren Frank, that's right. Dr. Frank can see that the rat is developing a burst of brain waves that the rat has not had before, a new kind of brain pattern. Then the rat is allowed to go and rest. And what happens is, Dr. Frank can watch this experience, these brain patterns, if you will, these brain waves make it into the hippocampus. It's the memory center of the brain. In effect, that experience has been laid down as learning and memorandum. However, if he stimulates the rat to have a new experience, the original pattern, the original waves never make it into the hippocampus. They don't become learning and memorandum. When you're in the checkout, when you are giving away all those little moments of time, lots of research indirect and direct backs this up. You are forfeiting the ability of your brain to synthesize things you learn, think about things that you might wanna do, process information. There's another thing I wanna mention here that's so simple and it fits in there. Emma Sopal is a terrific researcher down at Stanford who was born with vets coming back from Iraq or Iraq and Afghanistan in PTSD. So, she makes this fairly modest and also fairly startling discovery. It might be modest to us who thought about this stuff, but to the guys who had PTSD was remarkable. She asked them to do basic breathing exercises. We probably think of meditation, but any of the iterations you might pick up is meditation. Pretty soon, the startle response of these soldiers went down sharply. In a way, they stopped being as responsive to this. When they heard a door slam, they hit the death. When you hear your phone ring, you pick it up. Emma Sopal recommends doing a little bit of breathing now and then, acting your phone, you may empower this. You may be able to get more decisive, more deliberate, less reactive. Okay, here's another thing to think about. Let your mind wander. I will say, from my earlier caveat about the fledgling research of dopamine, this research is a little bit conflicting at this point, but there is some reasonable research, probably the mind share of it that shows to the extent that you can let your mind wander absolute stimulation, you are benefiting from it. These are all arguments, all arguments, not to put away your phone and not use it on a regular basis. These are actually leading these suggestions to a much simpler proposition. Put down your phone in little spots where you might feel the allure of it and you may discover that you wind up able to make better decisions about your phone in the long run. I can't possibly tell you what works for you when it works for you. I do know that if you create enough brain space, you may be able to see your patterns better. You may be able to learn and remember better. My man, just say pick your spots. Look at these stats. Imperius has checked email of other programs 30 seconds times per hour. I'm the woman driving in the car and how she had to, you know, she nearly swirled or she swirled out the road and you really get a sign. What's happening to her is happening to you when you switch all the time. Not the part about losing focus on your intended task. Yes, that, but also you have to switch back to the task you were doing. If you switch 30 to seven times per hour, that's a lot of switching costs as they say. Anyway, similar numbers, I won't go over them. I want to read you the most basic, simple, wonderful, lovely advice that I got from the guy that's the Harvard, the center of immediate child health at Harvard Medical School. He says, the headline is bring back or downtime is through the brain, what sleep is through the body. All right, that's a few cues broadly, a few suggestions broadly for how to take back the brain from this relationship, establish something more even-handed. So you use it for the slave really than it is, the tool that it is, and not being slaved yourself. I want to take you back to the car for a second. Well, this is how I put what Michael said another way, to the focus to go to the spoils. I think that's where we're headed. You know, we have this notion of digital divide. It long meant those who have technology and those who don't. I think it's going to come to be defined as those who can use their technology judiciously, who can have it in power then, and those who are overtaken by it. Okay, well can we talk for, do we have five minutes to tell you why what's happening in the car is happening? Yeah, okay. I want to end where I began by talking about the car, because there's more going on than merely this disconnect born of the intense lore of our home. That is a part of why we are even more likely to use our phones behind the wheel than we were three, four years ago. I'm pleased to say that tomorrow on the front page of the New York Times, I've got an article that is describing just how concerned safety advocates have gotten about the growing problem here, and I'll tell you there maybe we can discuss the textualizer. There's a really interesting development that's come out of the state of New York that is the equivalent of the breathalyzer. I'll come to it in a minute. Let me go back to the car. What's different now from past fights that we have public safety issues behind the wheel? We know certain things work. We know it. We think we know it. We thought we knew it. We seat belts and drunk driving. We had a basic, forgive better, plan of works on intended rules for the road. Top laws with public enforcement, plus strong public education equals change. Well, we've had these laws passed. We've had somewhat reasonable enforcement. We've had tons of public awareness. One of the problems is some of the solutions we've come up with aren't actually working. Can you play this for me, Tiffany, please? Joel Cooper? Oh, good boy. Please say a command after the beepers. No. Tell them. Okay, so one of the issues is some of the technological solutions we imagine might be a benefit or not seem to be a benefit. In fact, even when these things work, they don't ameliorate the neurological cost, the cost to attention that comes from interacting with your device. But as these show, using hands-free, often, as one researcher said to me, leads to an argument between the driver and his or her car. So, one thing is our technological solutions haven't thus far worked. Another thing is that some people are promising technological solutions that are potentially more of a problem than they are a solution, not just the one you've seen. This is an example of a technology that is backed by Qualcomm, I believe, in which you're going to get projected in a hologram in front of you on the road. The idea is, your eyes are still on the road. Are your eyes still on the road? Of course not. There's not a neuroscience to lie who studies this subject and thinks it's a good idea. The law of what this stems from, and this is what I really want to mention to you tonight, to recognize is that as in journalism, politics, a broader mantra for investigation of any kind, we must follow the money. No one ever told you when society was trying to get people to wear seat belts that it was a good idea not to wear your seat belt. Someone might have said, I don't like the law that tells me what to do, but no one ever said don't wear your seat belt, that's a good idea. And I have learned, do you know the name of Kenan Slyker who started that? She fought some pretty remarkable battles after her daughter was killed. One of them was against the alcohol industry. We've talked about this a bit, but I doubt that anybody told you it was a good idea to drink and drive. Sometimes there were ads she tells me showing people would go into containers. But no one ever told you that was a good idea. But here's the thing today. Some of our most powerful industries in this country are sending the message that it's okay to multitask behind the wheel. Today, from the most part, it's the car industry which is working very hard to get us into the showroom and one of the ways they're doing it is by giving us gadgets behind the wheel. This is the 17 inch screen in the Tesla. Maybe then people are in all ways with that. Before it was the car industry, it was the phone industry. You know where they put up their first cell phone towers? On the highways. Why did they do it? It was the only place you couldn't talk on the phone. These are some of our biggest industries who have been sending us the message that it's okay to be connected behind the wheel. Now, the phone industry is backed off. If you think that they've gotten religion, I think to a large extent they have, just also know their business models have changed. Once they got a big money per minute, remember when you had the brick phone and you willingly paid four bucks a minute? Well, now they sell minutes by the bucket in unlimited fashion. They do not need you on the phone while you're in the car. In fact, they'd probably rather not have you on the phone or even texting at that time because those are prime network minutes they'd rather have used another way. So understand what these forces are there and find the ad-add to these forces before I sum up. There are broader societal forces that would have us connected all the time. These also are big industrial forces in no way, in no way is this any kind of anti-capitalist thing. In fact, I think market forces can wind up working poor safety in a lot of ways and make well in this conversation. But Google, Yahoo, Apple, go down the list. They don't necessarily are telling you to stay connected behind the wheel. But they are essentially saying through their advertising, be on all the time. That is eyeballs, that subscription, the advertising essentially makes you look like a loser if you can't get a cell signal on Everest. Who are you to be out of touch? You are old, you are the wrong generation. It is cool to be on all the time. Okay, I'm gonna tell you two last things. One study, and then I'm gonna give you advice from a three-year-old, and then I will finish. The study is the chocolate cake study. Maybe if you don't think about anything else I've said tonight, remember the chocolate cake study. Some of you may have heard of it, I'll simplify it a bit. A bunch of people go into a room and they're asked to choose a bunch of study subjects. Would you like the snack? Would you like the chocolate cake for a snack? Or would you like the fruit? Some of the people are asked to remember a short number of digits. To a statistically significant degree, the people who are asked to remember the digits wind up much more likely to choose the cake. What gives? It's like this, by even something so small as remembering a few digits, when your working memory is taxed, which is an area of the brain from which you draw or cue your information in a cute situation, it can't compromise the thing, not just your decision-making, but the very thing that you think of. This is backed up by lots of other science. It's not isolated. When you're in the car and your hands are on the wheel, you are taking up some of your brain. So when the phone rings, already your decision-making is compromised. Already the thing you think about as your free will is compromised. The best time to make that decision is before you get in the car, before your working memory is taken up, before you're already compromised, before you're staring at the fire and you get the tap on the shoulder. Turn off the phone and put it in the middle of the car. You are going to see tomorrow in the New York Times that the preliminary estimates for road fatalities in 2015 were of 8% for 2014. It is the highest increase in 15 years. I had the privilege to talk to the head of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration yesterday. We were talking about this. He said, yeah, maybe half of that, three, four percent maybe is due to an improved economy, more miles from it. The rest, that's human behavior. Make the decision ahead of time, but don't take it from a piece of chocolate cake. Take it from my son. This is not my son. It's a rough approximation of all babies. My son is now seven, his name is Milo. I will tell you a true story as I come up. He's about three and we are back in, we're back in Denver at my in-laws. In fact, before I finish, just a quick round of applause for my wife who's come from Georgia tonight. Can you imagine how tired she is of hearing me talk? So we're back at her parents' house in Milo who's three at the time. He's walking across the floor at his foot, bouncing to one of those Fisher-Price mobile phones. And so it rains and the kid causes it to rain. And he picks it up and my son, I don't know that he knows the words he's about to say and I certainly wouldn't have believed he says them in the following order. He picks up the phone, Milo. He puts it to his ear. I'm sitting there watching through him. I can attest to this and he says, I'll call you from a landline. The best I can infer is that he heard me with shoddy service and he picked up one of daddy's, can't go to braces. Let me leave you with this. Chocolate cake or if you prefer, you'll call back from the landline. Thank you very much. Question, if you have a question written down on an index card for Q and A, please raise your hand so that Emily and Jennifer can come by to pick up your question. As we mentioned at the beginning, we have some questions that some of you email to us as you were buying your tickets and we're going to incorporate those as well. I have a really timely announcement as well. Someone here took Matt's advice about putting down foam in a very immediate fashion, apparently, because someone looked their foam in the bathroom. They picked it up from one of our reps who went back into the theater. Very funny. So Matt's taking a little breather now. I would like to introduce Rose Trilowinsky, owner of Swim America Davis and recent recipient of the U.S. Swim Associations' Guiding Like Award. Swim America was recently named Bill Stray Business of the year by the Davis Chamber of Colors. A Davis Parent University business sponsor for the year 2015-16, please welcome Rose. Oh my gosh. How many of you will take away one or two things that Matt said tonight? Those are amazing. Thank you so much for that. Swim America is a proud sponsor of Davis Parent University and all the wonderful, affordable opportunities that they've given our community to hear are really great speakers. How many of you were here in December's lecture with Julia Zittkar-Games, author of the New York Times Bestseller, How to Raise an Adult? Another great one, right? How many of you watched it from home? For the 8,500 people that are here tonight, DPU has made it possible for them to see this great presentation in the comfort of their own home online. What a great resource, right? When Joey Vito Minn, a board member, asked me to speak about why Swim America is a sponsor, my answer was really simple and very easy. Swim America invests in what we believe in and we believe in Davis Parent University, what they do and who they serve. And the DPU team puts a lot of time and energy finding relevant speakers for us in the Davis community. This group is 100% volunteer and operates solely on sponsorships and donations and they serve the children and the continued parent education for our community. And that's why we continue to support this group. So tonight, it's a hard thing for me to do, ask for money, but let's make a real commitment. That means I have to get on. So anyway, more seriously, let's really commit to making sure that these are afforded to us in the future by donating. And I know sometimes when I get asked to donate, I'm kind of unsure about how much I should donate. And so for us, our recommendation is 10 bucks. How many of you think this was worth 10 bucks? Right? Put a little bit more in the envelope. And again, this is not an easy thing for people to stand up here and ask for more donations. I know we get tapped, you know, the well has always gone to the same people kind of thing, but we really do think that this is a worthwhile organization bringing some fantastic resources to our community. So the bottom line is whatever you can do, there's a envelope like this that you can enthusiastically and generously fill with the checks made out to empower YOLO with DPU in the subject line and place your check or cash in the envelope you received when you walked in. And if you need one, I'm sure somebody will run to you. And the DPU volunteers are ready for donations. They're along the aisles here with your baskets. So as Matt said, tap your neighbor on the shoulder, make them respond and fill the basket. So with that, thank you all for what you do and what you contribute to the community. And I will turn this back over to Pam. Thanks, everyone. Still on, we didn't know. Okay. Versions of it. What types of reactions do you get from YOLO? What's the reactions you get? Mostly pretty gratifying. People seem to be engaged. I get a few questions over and over again. One of the questions I almost invariably get is, is it bad to talk to a passenger in my car? That happens almost every time. That's really a standard reaction. I get to have anybody throw food. So I take that as a piece of it. That was the first time. Yes. Our audience is so pretty nice. What's the answer to the passenger question? Well, the answer to the passenger question is that a passenger wants a passion of being a safety aide because they act as a second set of eyes on the road. And so they modulate their tone of voice and they say, hey, look out, it's icy. There is one caveat. Are there any teens in the audience? Couple. I'm sorry to out you guys like this, but the one place where that science doesn't hold up is if you have a teen driver and others in the car, the particular teens, it winds up being a distraction. But by contrast, when you're on the phone with someone, they can't see what you're doing. So they don't say, look out, it's icy. I have a couple of audience questions here. Yes, please. Here's one, given that you mentioned that people may have a primitive need for social connection, what ideas do you have to prevent trackers from checking the phones? Yeah, I mean, some of it we discuss, some of it might be allowing your entertainment to be radio or allowing yourself to largely focus on the road, but think a little bit. I mean, here's the reality is the question about separating from your phone sort of presupposes that there's a reason to be doing. And for the most part, there's not an urgent reason to be doing it. I think if you explore how you use your phone during the day, it's often far less urgent than you imagine it is. So I mean, the first thing I hope is just understanding these mechanisms that are at play tonight, you know, with radio, you might also wonder, well, how much does that take up? There was an argument when radio first came into the car that that would be distracting. You know what, there's no doubt that it is to some extent distracting. 32,000 people are dying on the roads every year with 94% of that being human behavior. We are getting distracted. All things being equal, you would love to be able to just focus on the road. But quite honestly, driving is most often so easy that it's boring. It's why you get away with texting some of the time. The radio's a reasonable alternative in this respect. It takes up less of your brain function to listen to the radio than it does to process a conversation and say something back to somebody. That takes up not only, you know, you're not only listening, you're processing and forming an answer, you're using your view of visual cortex to picture what's going on in the conversation. You're fairly well hijacked in that one. What about some, I mean, some really practical tips. Say somebody does not have this iron will power to ignore the phone ringing. Do you, I think I heard police officers and highway patrolmen suggest putting your phone in the back seat? Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, no, that's, you should give the talk. That's good. Thank you. Respect the alternating letters and numbers. Listen, the reason I don't do that is I can't even get to the point where you should put your phone in the glove compartment. So I shouldn't know, but it's a great point. I mean, look, I guess that was sort of my point about making the decision ahead of time. If you can make that decision ahead of time, then you won't be seduced by the prospect. You can put it on silent. You know, there was a line by a guy named Steve Largent. He used to be a Seattle Seahawks wide receiver. Before he went and became the head of the phone industry, he was the phone industry spokesman. Back when we were writing the series that ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize. And he said people don't, you know, they want to be on the phone when we're in the car. There's already technology to stop it. It's called the off button and people don't use it. Now, there was much wrong about the case that the industry was making then, but he was right about that and that off button is still there. You can also download 4.3 from AT&T, Verizon, other companies, 4.3 software that will effectively shut down your phone from ringing when it senses that it's moving at the speed of a car and if you're the passenger, you can just disable that. Food for thought. Good to know. This question asks, are there any health risks associated with smartphones or tablets or wireless earpieces near or on your body all day and or all night? Yeah, I've looked a little bit at this. Enough to know that the research is too early to say much about. There have been a couple pretty pointed articles talking about the electromagnetic frequencies. I haven't seen enough that I could get invested journalistically in it right now. I do know that to create some distance, they moved where the, I think where the antenna is down to the mouth area so it's away from the head. I mean, it kind of, this is not a New York Times reporter speaking. This is just mad. Kind of wigs me out to put the thing by my head, but I got nothing to back that up. Okay. Make your own call. Well, I'm gonna ask you to put your New York Times hat back on. You asked me to write up the text a lot, sir. Yes, I'm glad you did. So this story tomorrow that I mentioned in the front page is mentions to, spends a bunch of time on what is a kind of a landmark moment in this conversation. After nearly a decade looking at this subject, oh really, six, seven years looking at this subject, I've watched various ideas come up that seem like versions of other ideas that have come up to solve the problem. In the New York state legislature right now has been introduced an idea that seems on the border of profoundly different. It's got maybe very serious problems associated with it, but it's called the textalizer. I'll let you make your own decision obviously, but I'll tell you some of the pros and cons. It would work like this. It would be a new roadside test akin to a breathalyzer. With a breathalyzer, if you get pulled over and there's reason to believe that for the officer that you may be drunk or under the influence, you must take a breathalyzer or miss a suspension of your license. In this case, at any crash site, if this law were passed, an officer would be allowed to ask for your phone, would plug it into a machine that would mention what activity has happened, not what the communications were, but whether there has been any activity, emailing, texting, other apps that are prohibited by the hands-free law and when it happened. The textalizer, the ACLU among others is greatly concerned about the privacy implications here. There are other issues you might be able to imagine as problems, for instance, what if you did voice the text? Right, this is really thorny, yeah. It's very thorny. Here, there are two things about it that are making no money. Well, just to address the legal issue, the way this, the gentleman who's introduced this, a Democrat in Felix Ortiz passed the nation's first hands-free law in New York in 2001. He's got some gravitas on this and he, it is co-sponsored in a bipartisan manner with a powerful member of the Republican-controlled Senate. So, it happens five bars in backing. The argument they make on the legal, may I go on just a bit more about this? Sure, yeah. The legal front is. You have several minutes. Okay, all right, okay. The argument they make on the legal front is having a driver's license is a privilege, not a right. And just as we use that argument to allow a breathalyzer, so we would allow it in this case, the other case they make is we have got to do something. We need a greater kind of deterrence. I'll ask you the question. When I first heard about this, actually, I was speaking in San Anselmo and I asked this question the very day I heard about this. I wanna ask you guys, if you knew that an officer could pull, could test your phone the minute a crash happened, would it deter you from using your phone behind the wheel? Just raise your hand if that's the case. Yeah. So, I mean, I won't call it desperation, but there's real concern right now about what's happening behind the wheel and this is an effort to find the answer. As there should be as well. Let's talk about this whole switching gears thing, digits, numbers, letters, because I see people, as I mentioned in my introduction of you, but I see a lot of people at stop lights, taking a quick glance and it would seem, I would think, to the user to be harmless and I was just taking a quick glance and oh, the light just turned green and I'm gonna put it down and I'm completely focused about driving. Is that so? It's a great question and the answer is yes, most of the time it is harmless. This is why we are terrible scientists in our own lives. It goes like this, a hundred times you text and drive, a hundred times you get away with it and therefore you tell yourself you used the big old air go, a hundred percent of the time I don't get in a wreck therefore I won't. Here's the problem, you mentioned the switching costs. Taken from a guy who's been looking at horrible deadly accidents for six or seven years. There comes a time when you have almost no large keeper here. I'll tell you a story about a guy who was just at this point who was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge north. He was in his lane, he was on a hands-free phone, he was talking to his wife about what to order from an immediate food restaurant, a car coming the other direction on one of those windy days on the bridge swirled just a touch across the elevator. He was looking ahead by the time he had the opportunity to react away from his call, he had killed the driver in the other car. That was not his fault. Maybe he would say, well, that was her problem. I doubt most of us would say that. It's the kind of example, I'm sure you've had this happen where you look up from any number of things, the radio, your phone, glancing at a stop sign, your kid in the back, and you realize I missed my exit. Oh, I should have gotten off there and I should have turned right. The switching costs in that circumstance can be different. Are there any states remaining that don't have hands-free laws? Well, only 14 states have hands-free laws, so it's the majority. The majority of the audience, that's right. 46 plus form of Virgin Islands. For some reason, I feel like it's all the places who voted for Rubio. They have the technicals, they have texting names. What's the holdup in the 46 states? Is it a phone lobby or? Less so the mobile phone lobby. When we have more time, I'll tell you some of the remarkable things they said when they wanted to fight it in the past, but there are a lot of legislators who will tell you, as they have told me, I rely on this phone behind the wheel. I need to be able to do that more in a kind of, if you take the, these are broad generalizations, gross generalizations, but some of the more conservative states, they will say, look, no one can tell me what to do when I'm in the car. Similar arguments were made about seat belts, they were made about drunk driving to some extent, they're being made now. Did you, in your research for your articles and your book, look at technology's effect on the growing brain? My five-year-old, for instance, loves the thought it's like candy to him. Yeah. This is a great question to study. I think it's gonna come out in the next few days, summarizing the impact on young people's brains. I wanna tell you that, try, is that a try as a truck? I gotta do the whole thing over. I gotta do the whole thing over. As much as I've looked into it, the research is very early, and there's not a ton I can tell you. Let me tell you what I can say more certain. Well, I'll say two things. My kids are the same age, roughly as yours. I don't know, anybody, I'm gonna have young kids, or, you know, I think you'd probably would agree with me. I certainly feel this way with my kids at this age. It's probably the hardest battle in the face of parents right now, is what to do about the media part. So let me tell you the one thing we can be sure of, that the research career is out. And then I'll tell you some stuff that's less correct than we're learning. In addition to all the stuff I told you already about learning and memory, which is applicable to older and younger, there is, at the very least, a really serious opportunity cost when your kids spend a lot of time on media. This is what the scientists will tell you. Being outside, moving, social interaction, which develops empathy, that is no small thing. So there is, at the least, an opportunity cost for other stuff that is proven to be beneficial. There's also some early research that begins to suggest that learning may be affected. There's research out of the University of Washington that shows when you manipulate blocks as a toddler, you get the secretion of certain learning chemicals that you don't get when you watch a show. There's certain research that shows when kids watch like SpongeBob, they become much more hyperactive, which might have an, might attend, or I have something to do with attention. This research is very early. It is something researchers are very compelled by right now. I'll tell you, finally, what the American Pediatric Association says. They say now, two hours a day for a kid's screen time, do you know that it used to be for kids under two, it used to be two hours a week? If you ask the people who really know why the American Pediatric Association changed that view, it's not because they think kids should watch two hours a day, it's because they felt that they would be seen as irrelevant if they didn't change their view. So the people who know about this are concerned. The research is very early. Very interesting. So how best then to convince teens not to self-heat and drive or snapchat and drive. You showed us this really alarming statistic. And you showed us that purple brain that showed that executive function isn't fully developed, it was someone to say in their early 20s or so. So what's a frightened parent to do and tell their child? I've heard two things. I've heard lately talking to safety advocates for this story I'm doing tomorrow, who are trying to up the ante for all of us, they look at safety in two ways. I'm gonna tie this back to our kids in a second. One is a long-term horizon, which is about education. And one is a short-term horizon which says, basically, I don't care what you think, I'm gonna make you stop. And that's what you wound up doing with drunk driving. You created an expertise that was so sharp, harsh. I hate to be so blunt about this, but I think if I were to interpret their language in a family setting, we educate your kids as much as you can. But this is a non-negotiating. So this is like, hey, I'm gonna get the thing from the insurance company that tells me if you're on the phone, and I'm gonna take it away if you do this. I'm gonna go look at what, I'm gonna look at your phone behavior. I'm gonna monitor it with my phone to make sure. I mean, in this case, when behind the wheel of a deadly weapon and teen drivers are notoriously the worst, I don't think it's about convincing anybody. I think we have to move beyond that. And some states now are getting to that point where in New York, for example, if you're under 21 and you get top spot twice next thing while driving, you lose your license for a year. So society's beginning to take those steps. I don't think parents should be any far behind them. Should not be behind that if they want to be certain their teens are compliant. Sorry, teens. It's for your own good. Thank you very much. We wanna thank Matt Richtel, author of The Wandering, for being with us here at University. On October 19th, we're going to be joined by New York Times money columnist Ron Lieber, author of The Opposite of Spoiled. I will not be in town while traveling in China. So on that date, I'm going to leave you in the very capable hands of my former KCRA news colleague, the beautiful and talented, Kristin Samoos, who's joined us here this evening. She's a good friend and a great presenter, so I will be a chance to see you. Great, that's great, New York Times colleagues. We invite you to join us right now for a book signing in the front foyer that's hosted by Abbott Reader, and you can still hand the donations to any of the reps on your way out. We'll drop one on the donation table. We look forward to seeing you in the fall for the eighth annual Davis Parent University. So until then, please be well and be safe, and have a great night.