 Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scott Okutaya here at Telecom Exchange Los Angeles with my good friend Dr. Julie Albright. She is the digital sociologist, author of an amazing book. We'll get to that in a second. Ted Talk Speaker and I'm Mason's member, board member I should say. So if you don't know Julie, actually most of you probably should if you haven't. But we are so excited that you are here. She just was our keynote today here at Telecom Exchange LA. We've been having a fabulous time exploring sort of excerpts, if you will, from your book called Left to their Own Devices. How digital natives are reshaping the American dream, fabulous book. And so let's start with, I know there's like so much, but how has technology changed our pursuit of happiness in the American dream? Well in the book I look at how people used to chase what you called the American dream. The idea that you're going to grow up and get married, buy a home, have children, buy a car and have 2.5 kids. Many people went to church, they joined a political party, they joined local clubs like the Rotary, all these sorts of things. And all that's changing now. For example, you look at older people that went through World War II, about 65% of them or more were married by the time they were 32 years old. And now it's only about 25%. So it's a market change. And these changes go through everything from getting a driver's license to car ownership to home ownership. So it's really shifting around values and behaviors. And frankly there's a lot of companies that are sort of scrambling to figure out these changes, to figure out where to position themselves going forward. And so this digital generation, these millennials and others who are being raised with the internet just always available, they're becoming detached, untethered is the word you use in your book. Tell us about that. Yeah, so this idea that the young people are unhooking from these traditional stabilizing, we could say, social structures and are hyper attached to digital technology. So a lot of their validation of self, their identity and whatnot becomes reinforced by social media likes and shares and comments and all that. So they become very externally driven around that kind of thing. So it's really a change. Young people are always concerned about and tuned into how they fit in and how others are taking them. But this really amplifies out to a global scale and the pressure on them is enormous. And so speaking generally, are they happy? Well, we see now, at least I'm in the university, we see the highest rates in 30 years of things like anxiety, depression and suicides. And so I view this also physical illnesses like obesity, for example. I view this as a sort of a public health crisis issue where we just, and I'm not about throwing phones away at all or not being on social media or any of it. But it's just we need to be a little more conscious and I think sort of recalibrate our relationship between ourselves, each other, our bodies, nature and our devices. And so how are we as business owners and leaders, how are we able to incentivize and keep this younger generation in our workforce? Right. So I think, you know, some of the things that the workplace can do is really provide an anchor place for young people. They're not getting it from a marriage. They're often not getting it from a community because they're moving place to place. They're not getting it from the church by and large. So where are they finding this anchor spot? And a lot of them don't have friends now, too, by the way. So the idea that, you know, maybe the workplace is a place where you could do team building around a nature event or around some kind of philanthropy or something where you're part of something bigger than yourselves and building those connections and also offering support and wellness type of things. You know, maybe it's a different way of thinking about what business is about. But as I mentioned today, if you've got employees melting down, that's not good for anybody. And it's expensive to replace these employees. So let's maybe rethink the perks and rethink, you know, what business is and can be for young people that need an anchor point in the world to stabilize themselves. Yeah. And work remotely, offer childcare if they need it. Yeah. So one of the things we were talking about was, you know, there's more unmarried people and thus more children born to unwed mothers, you could say. And so over the course of time, if you want to attract females, maybe childcare is the thing to offer. So, you know, this sort of out of the box thinking in a way where you're looking at the demographic and behavioral shifts and saying, how do we sort of adjust ourselves to this new value set, new behavior set coming in amongst young untethered adults is what I call them. Yeah. And your recent TED Talk, of course, I highly recommend it. It's on YouTube. You had just done it this summer, right? Yes. So it's really one of the newest TED Talks out there. But you finished your interview with this big question. How can we be happier? How can we reconnect? So can we pick up from there any tips? Yeah. So, you know, somehow, you know, I started out talking in that TED Talk about how, you know, everyone has this, you know, right to pursue happiness. And somehow we just fell off the track, fell off the road. And so how can we sort of get back on the road? And we're not going to do that isolated in a room. We're going to do that together. We're social creatures and we need to sort of have a balance between that time alone with a device and the time with each other and find moments for that in our lives. Absolutely. Thank you, Dr. Julie Albright. And folks, please note her book left to their own devices. How digital natives are we shaping the American dream? A Must-Read now available on Amazon. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV. Happy networking.