 So, if you've been listening to Mind Pump for a little while, you've heard us talk about the issues that technology may be posing. We've talked about how we think it's contributing to the distractibility among kids. Maybe it's a problem with ADD. Maybe it's causing health issues. Well, we actually had a former Stanford professor on this episode, near a all. Come on and actually debate some of these things that we thought. And I'm not going to lie, he changed our minds quite a bit. He kind of blew our minds a little bit in this episode. He did. He was extremely logical. He used real data, real science. And he explained how a lot of the stuff that we even we've been saying or we've been led to believe is alarmist. And he makes a very, very compelling argument. We think you're going to really enjoy this episode. Now he has two books that you can read about the subject. One of them is called Indistractable. The other one is called Hooked. I think you can find both of them on his website, indistractable.com, or his other website, which is nearanfar.com, near spelled N-I-R. He also has a great TED talk that you can see on YouTube. The title of that talk is What Makes Some Technology So Habit Forming. And then you can also find him on Instagram at N-E-Y-A-L-9-9. Anyway, this episode was mind blowing. It's all about technology, how it's affecting us. And if some of the information you've been getting may be alarmist. It might not be as bad as you've been led to believe. Also, before that episode starts this month, Maps Anabolic is half off. Now Maps Anabolic, phenomenal program for getting stronger, building muscle, speeding up a metabolism. So if you have a metabolism that's a bit slow and you want to be able to burn more calories, do this one. It's a great program to get you stronger at some of the core lifts like bench press, deadlifts, and squats. Men and women love this program. It's our most popular workout. It lasts about three months, or it could be as long as four months if you're starting pre-phase. It's three days a week in the gym with trigger sessions done on the off days so you can work out as much as six days a week if you want. Again, it's extremely effective. It's 50% off. Here's how you get the discount. Go to mapsred.com, that's M-A-P-S-R-E-D.com, and use the code red50, R-E-D-5-0, no space for the discount. Have you heard of Adam Atler's Irresistible? Yeah, he's a good friend of mine, actually. I'm dropping into his class to teach in a few weeks. You're going to have to put an order, and that's somebody who I've been trying to get on the show myself. I would love to talk to him. Sure. You got it. I'm happy to make the connection. That was a great read. I read that a couple years ago. It's a constant reference. Okay. So we have some disagreements. Oh, so that's why I wanted to start you there, because, so funny, Justin and I, Justin found you years ago when him and I were building an app, and we were trying to gamify fitness. We were trying to, obviously, learning all about the feedback loop or whatever, so to keep you hooked and coming back. I think that's when he ran into your TED talk, and he shared it with me. I think a year after that, I found Adam Attler's book. I read Jen Torrey's iGen, and that was just like, that freaked me out. I talked about it on the show all the time, so that was like the first thing I was hoping that you'd actually knew who he was, and it sounds like you do, and I would love to hear what you guys disagree about, because our audience has heard me talk about it irresistible many times. Yeah. I'm going to unfreak you out. Oh, right. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, so I actually was going to call my next book irresistible, and it took me five years to write. I ended up calling it indistractable, not irresistible, because the more I delved into this topic, the more I realized that technology is not irresistible. We can resist it. And so that's what becoming indistractable is all about. Indistractable sounds like indestructible. Right. It's a superpower. Right. And I do believe that having this power to choose your attention and control your life, deciding to live with personal integrity, doing what it is you say you're going to do is going to be the skill of the century. It's incredibly important, whether it's in your home life, whether it's in taking care of your physical health, whether it's about your professional career. Being able to do what it is you say you're going to do is going to be incredibly important. And so I was patient zero with all this. I thought at one point that technology was irresistible. I written hooked, and then after a few years after writing hooked, and to clarify, I wrote the book hooked. I never wrote it for Facebook. Facebook never hired me. I've never worked for those big companies. Those were the companies where I learned these techniques and then wanted to democratize them so that guys like you could build fitness apps and health care apps and apps to help people save money. And that's exactly what's happened in the past five years since hooked was published. So it was never for the big tech companies. It was about taking those same techniques to help people build healthy habits in their lives. But then shortly after I wrote hooked, I found that I was getting distracted. And there was this one particular instance where I was with my daughter and we had this afternoon together and we had this book of activities that daddies and daughters could could play together. And one of the activities was to ask each other this question that if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember the question verbatim, but I don't remember her answer because when she was answering my question, I was busy looking at my phone and she walked out of the room. She realized that she was less important than my phone and she got the hint. She left the room. And next thing I knew, I looked up and she was gone. And if I'm honest with you, it didn't just happen once. It would happen with my daughter. It would happen with my relationships. It would happen when I would sit down to work. I constantly kept getting distracted. And so my natural impulse was, ah, it's technology's fault. Technology's doing it to me. How was I part of this industry that gets people hooked? And but then when I took a step back and I read into what these books tell you, what books that say technology is the problem tell you to do, get rid of the technology. The technology is a problem. So if we got rid of it, that would solve it. And so I did that. And I got myself a flip phone on Alibaba that cost 10 bucks. And it had no apps, just text messages and phone calls. All it did. And then I went on eBan. I got myself a word processor with no internet connection. All it did, you can just type on it. And I said, ah, now I'm going to focus. Now I'm going to sit down at my desk and I'm going to do my work, no distraction. And then I'd see that book on the bookshelf that I'd been meaning to check out. Or let me just tidy up my desk real quick. Let me just take out the trash real quick. And I kept getting distracted, even though there wasn't any technology that was distracting me. So it turns out the distraction ain't new. It's been around a very, very long time. In fact, Plato talked about it 2,500 years ago. It called it a crassia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. And so the fact that technology is not the source of distraction, the more you dig into it, the source of distraction, even though distraction is easier to find today, clearly. I mean, the fact that it's more pervasive, more persuasive, if you're looking for distraction, you're going to find. But technology is not the real cause. It's what's called the proximal cause. The root cause of why we get distracted is much more interesting. And if we're going to actually solve distraction, we have to understand what those root causes of distraction are. What are you talking about? So in order to understand, well, let me first, okay, let me define what distraction is. So we get, I'm a big terminology, guys. So let's make sure we understand the words we're using. So the opposite, the way to understand distraction is to understand what distraction is not. The opposite of distraction is not focused. The opposite of distraction is traction, okay? Both come from the same Latin root, trahare, which means to pull. And you'll notice both words end in the same six letters, A-C-T-I-O-N, that spells action. So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do in life, okay? Things that you do with intent. Now, if what you intend to do is play a video game or go to the gym or spend time with your daughter or whatever it might be, whatever it is you plan to do is traction. The opposite of traction is distraction. Anything that you do that is not what you plan to do with intent. So this frees us from this ridiculous moral hierarchy that playing Candy Crush somehow, that's a waste of time, but watching football for three hours on TV, that's somehow okay. No, anything you plan to do with intent that's consistent with your values, do it, great. So you've got traction, you've got distraction. Now, the next question, let's really start from base level, understanding of why, not only do why do we get distracted, why do we do anything? What's the nature of human motivation? And it turns out that most people, when you ask them what's the nature of human motivation, they're gonna give you some version of carrots and sticks. This is called Freud's Pleasure Principle. We do things in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, right? Wrong, not true. Turns out from a neurological perspective, everything we do, everything we do, is done through a desire to escape discomfort. It's pain all the way down. Physiologically, we know this is true. If you think about how when you're cold, that doesn't feel good, you put on a jacket. You go back inside, it's hot, you take it off. You feel hunger pangs, you eat, and when you're full, oh, that doesn't feel good, you stop eating. So those are physiological responses. Same goes for psychological sensations. When you're lonely, check Facebook. When you're uncertain, Google. When you're bored, Reddit, stock prices, the news, sports scores, lots and lots of things cater to this uncomfortable sensation of boredom. So that means if all human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, that means that time management is pain management. That fundamentally, the root cause of distraction, it ain't our technology. It's the fact that we are looking for psychological pacification, like babies sucking on pacifiers. We're looking for relief from something we don't want to feel. And if we don't acknowledge that fact, that we are using these devices and the generation ago, it was different distraction. Distraction is nothing new. It's been around for a very, very long time. The core reason, the root cause of why we get distracted is because of what's called these internal triggers, these uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape. And the goal here, the reason, one of the ways we become indistractable is that we learn to channel that discomfort, those uncomfortable emotional states towards traction instead of distraction. Question, when we're, do you think that technological devices and that the way that they're designed may not be the root of distraction, but do you think that they may contribute to other problems because they, for lack of a better term, exploit or, you know, I hate using that word because I don't think people are actually sitting there trying to exploit us, but do you think that they can make a natural human desire or issue worse? And I like, I compare it to the natural human desire to eat foods that are hedonistic. And for most of human history, this wasn't a problem because food was limited. So you didn't have a lot of problems with food aside from starving. Then we solved that problem by producing lots of food and then creating hyper-palatable food. And so the issue isn't that the food is necessarily the problem. It's the fact that we like seeking out this hedonistic pleasure and now we have an obesity epidemic, for example. So the food may not be the necessarily the root cause of the problem, but it's definitely gasoline on the fire. Would you say that technology is similar in the sense that these apps and social media, because that was around in the 80s and 90s before this stuff, we had TV. TV was the big problem. And Super Mario Brothers. But TV is like... And heavy metal music. That was supposed to melt our brain, right? All this stuff was supposed to melt our brain. Right, but TV was like strawberries and apples. I'm a caveman, strawberry, apple, yum, right? Now we have like donuts and like candy. That's apps and social media. Do you think it may be like gasoline on the fire or do you think no, it poses no? And I definitely know, I can definitely respect that we tend to be freak out over anything that's new. There's pictures of people in their newspapers on trains from the 1920s and people are worried that they're not talking to each other. People had issues with phones and stuff like that. So I get that. But do you think that maybe we're starting to reach a point where we may need to pay attention a little bit more? Certainly we need to pay attention. And there are definitely knock on effects that can be deleterious, right? So part of the unfortunate byproduct of people using devices too much is that they are losing sleep, right? That is particularly with kids. One of the suggestions in the book is that we need to make sure that there are no external triggers. External triggers are all the pings, dings and rings, all the things in our environment that can prompt us towards distraction. Those need to be out of our kids' rooms at night because we know that sleep is, the research is pretty conclusive that kids need sleep. All of us need sufficient sleep. So if there's something interrupting your sleep in your bedroom, get that out of your bedroom. But is it the technology's fault, right? Is it the ping and the ding on the phone that's at fault or is it the fact that you have put the phone in the bedroom or the television screen in your kid's room when they really need to sleep? It's, oh, for example, there's an example in the book of what happens with technology in the workforce. I can tell you these four methods for becoming indistractable and you can use these in your life to become indistractable yourself. But what happens if your boss calls you at 8 p.m. on a Friday night? Is it the telephone that's the problem or is it your jerky boss that doesn't respect your time? So the technology is the tool, just like a hammer. A hammer can be used to build a home. A hammer can be used to bash someone's head in. So it's really about how we use it. But the fact of the matter is we're not going back to the days before donuts. Donuts are here. Social media ain't going away. And we don't want it to go away. Do we want a techno prohibitionist society? I love alcohol, right? It's a great thing. It's a lot of fun to sometimes get a little tipsy. And if you use it responsibly, it's wonderful. I don't want to go back to the days of prohibition. Nobody does, I don't think. Very few people. And the same goes for technology. It's not going away. So what choice do we have? We can't wind back the clock. The only choice we have is to find ways to do what human beings have always done with a new technology. We adapt our behaviors and we adopt new technologies to fix the last generation of technology. Paul Rolio, the philosopher said, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. It's impossible to invent a world-changing technology that touches billions of lives without having some negative repercussions. So I'm not an apologist for the tech industry. There's lots of stuff the tech industry does that they need to be able to count for. Monopoly status, data incursion, political interference, lots of bad stuff. But when it comes to this one question of is technology hijacking our brains? Is it irresistible? Is it addicting everyone? Not only is that not true, it's not helpful because when you tell people it's the big bad corporations doing it to you, right? They fall into two camps. The blamers or the shamers. The blamers say they're doing it to me. It's the tech companies and there's nothing I can do about it, right? That's what the blamers say. And of course, this teaches what's called learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is the psychological phenomenon where if you think you don't have agency and control, you stop trying. You're a victim. My kid is acting crazy. Not my fault. It's the technology. The games are doing it to me. It's not nothing I can do, right? My husband won't stop, get off their phone. Well, it's not that our marriage isn't where it should be. It's not the technology. Do you feel though there may be a lack of education in terms of how to set parameters and barriers for these products that definitely do hijack into your behaviors and try to kind of lead you in a certain direction? Let me, so hijacking is what they did to us on 9-11. Hijacking is not your iPhone. There is nothing that Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or Tim Cook can do if you turn off your goddamn notification settings. Two thirds of people with a smartphone, listen to this, two thirds of people with a smartphone never change their notification settings. Can we seriously say that tech is hijacking our brains, addicting us, it's irresistible when you haven't taken 10 minutes to turn off those notifications? Yeah, you're talking about personal responsibility and I think we're all 100% behind that. I think the problem isn't that I think corporations are bad and that we need to pass laws against them. I think the issue is it's new and we don't yet understand how to manage, how to manage them, how to develop behaviors around them. I find it really interesting that I'm almost 40 years old, I have all my notifications turned off and yet I still feel the desire to look over and check my Instagram again. And I also understand how they work the algorithm where if I got 1,000 likes in 10 minutes, I don't get those 1,000 likes right away. They get dripped to me over the course of the next hour to make me wanna come back and say, oh, did I get another 50 likes or whatever? But by the way, do you know that, is that true for a fact? Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure that is true. Oh really? Yeah, I've heard folks say that. Adam Attler talks about it in his book. I don't think that's actually true. I don't think he has actually verified it. That Instagram does that. I should have brought you guys both here together at the same time. I've actually seen Instagram say, we do not do that on Twitter. Oh really? You know, but there's just, there's a lot of misperception out there that I think. Well, my point was that I have the notifications off. I'm wise enough to know that they've engineered it to make me wanna come back, yet I still feel the desire to do that. And so my fear or my concern is that if I was somebody who was here before this technology came around and after and aware and still struggle with the temptation, similar to the story you told with your own daughter, obviously you're well aware of all of it too. My concern is the generations that are coming up. And to Justin's point, are we not educating our kids that are coming up with these tools that, hey, this hammer can be dangerous too. And maybe you shouldn't be at five years old staring at a screen for two hours at a time, but parents are loving that because it works as a great babysitter now that you didn't have before. So I guess that's where I come from. I don't blame the tech or the people that created it, but maybe it's conversations that need to be had with parents or- It's such a new technology. It's gotten adopted so quickly that we haven't yet understood how to develop, I think behaviors around them. Like the processed food generation in the 70s and 80s, like it was so fast and everybody's like, this is great. And now we know, like, okay, probably not the best thing to eat every single day or whatever. So maybe we could talk about those a little bit and because I think it's different with kids than it is with adults. Like your brains get wired. There's a different level of plasticity with children's brains if I'm not mistaken. And can their brains get more wired to seek these things out because they're exposed to them so early? Yeah, I think there's a lot going on here with the discussion, but I think one important point is that we've been here before, right? That societies develop what's called social antibodies, that when we learn that a behavior is harmful to us, we're not stupid, right? If you go to the grocery store and you buy an apple and that apple is rotten, maybe you'll give the store another chance, but if you go back and buy another rotten apple, you're gonna stop buying from that store. And what people are finding is if a product is hurting them, guess what, they moderate their use, they look for a competitor product to use instead or they stop using it all together. And that's exactly what we find happening with people's phones. That people are learning, hey, wait a minute, there's a right place and a wrong place to use these technologies. And I love that. I think that's great. I have no ties to these companies. If you don't wanna use them, great. If they don't serve you, dump them. What I don't think is helpful is to say, ah, that's what's doing it to me, that's what's doing it to our kids. I mean, if you think about how far we've come in terms of smoking in this country, how did that happen? Well, of course, legislation definitely played a role, but a big part of it, I remember when I was growing up in the 80s, we had ashtrays all over our house. We didn't, my parents didn't smoke. My dad had given up smoke in years before. My mom never smoked. And yet we had these ashtrays all over the place. And I remember people, and that was because back in the 80s, if you came to someone's house, you just expected to be able to light up in their living room. Oh, that's interesting. Can you imagine if someone lit up in your living room? Like my wife would throw that person out on the street if someone tried to just light up in my living room without asking or going outside or something. And so how did that happen? There's no law. He said, okay, well, legislation changed. Well, there's no law that says you can't smoke in someone's living room. What change is that we adopted new norms, new social behaviors around the appropriate time to use technology? And I've already seen this happening. So when I used to teach at Stanford, the first year I taught, I would see half my students on their phones during class. And then as time went on, people started to realize, wait a minute, if I'm on my phone, I'm not really concentrating on what the professor is lecturing about. I'm not gonna do as well on my test. And they started moderating that behavior. And now we actually, like we have words for this, fubbing, fubbing is phone snubbing. It's when you're with somebody and you're out to dinner or lunch or something, and they take out their phone, they're snubbing you. They're fubbing you, phone snubbing you. And people are learning that these kinds of behaviors are rude. And so we adapt our behaviors and we adopt new technologies to help us put these bad aspects in their place. So one of the tools to putting technology in its place is using tech to fight tech. So one of the things my daughter uses, and I use it for her frequently, is this app called Forrest. It's a free app. You open the app, you dial in how much time you want to do focused work for. It's a very simple interface. And when you push go, a little virtual tree is planted. And if you pick up the phone and do anything with it, the little virtual tree dies. And you don't want to be a tree murderer, right? And so that free tool, this technology, is a way that we can use tech against tech, right? It's just like how car manufacturers started putting in seat belts in cars 17 years before any legislation mandated it. Why? Because guess what? Safer cars sell better. And that's exactly what the tech companies are doing now with Apple Screen Time and Google Well-Being. It's exactly what they're doing. No, I really like what you're saying, and I appreciate everything you're saying. You use the example of cigarettes. And yes, humans, societally, we do adapt and change our behaviors 100%. Sometimes it takes a long time though. Takes time. Like cigarettes killed a lot of people for a long time before we started changing our behaviors. We're still in the middle of an obesity epidemic. I'm seeing signs that it's starting to change. People are starting to change their behaviors. How long do you think it's gonna take for us to really suffer the consequences of addiction to technology or whatever? And do we know how great the consequences will be for the parents that didn't pick up on this five years ago and handed their three-year-old a phone and that three-year-old's been doing it for five, six years consistently for three, five hours a day? Well, this is exactly the conversation I'm trying to facilitate, right? By writing indistractable, I'm trying to accelerate the process of spreading these social antibodies, of learning these techniques so that all of us can become indistractable. I don't think we have any other choice because the tech isn't going away. So the faster we learn these techniques, the faster we teach them to our children, the better off I think society will be. What are some of these techniques? Sure, so okay. So we talked about the first one is to master these internal triggers. That's the very first step. We have to understand that time management is pain management. And in order to not get distracted, we have to do what we say we're going to do, we have to be able to channel those uncomfortable sensations towards traction as opposed to distraction. That's the first big strategy. The second big strategy is to make time for traction. That most people don't keep any sort of a calendar. And I learned this in my five years of research writing indistractable. I would meet with a lot of folks. I had one friend who said, you know, I'm so distracted these days, I can't get anything done because did you hear what happened in the news today? And this happened on Twitter and my boss wants this over Slack and my kid is texting me, I can't get anything done. I'm constantly distracted. And I said, wow, that's really rough. You know, what did you get distracted from today? Can you show me what you plan to do? What's on your calendar? And she said, well, let me take a look. And she took out her calendar and she said, well, I got a dentist appointment today. There was nothing else on her calendar. So here's the thing. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. If you didn't plan to do anything. Exactly. If you have white space on your calendar, of course you know what you're gonna do with that white space. You're gonna putz around on Instagram. But if you plan your day, and by the way, this isn't some pet technique. This has been verified in thousands of studies. Psychologists call this making an implementation intention. Just a fancy way of saying, planning out what you're gonna do and when you're going to do it. It's one of the most effective techniques you could possibly use to do what it is you say you're gonna do. But very few people do this in their day-to-day lives. They just complain they're distracted but they didn't know what they got distracted from. So that's the second step is to make time for traction. The third step is to hack back the external triggers. The external triggers, the pings and dings on our phones and our computers, in our office environments, how much distraction is caused by an open floor plan office. Tons of distraction comes from the fact that we just work today in offices without doors. And so people are constantly distracted when they walk by each other's desk. Well, it turns out you can do something about that. So every copy of Indistractable comes with this screen sign. It's a piece of card stock. You pull it out of the book, you fold it into thirds and you put it on your computer monitor. And it says I'm Indistractable at the moment, please come back later. And this technique has been shown to be very, very effective to just give you some head space. Like let me just concentrate for a little bit. It sets the cultural norm around the office that we don't constantly need to be reactive to everything. Sometimes we need time to reflect as well. And then the fourth step is to prevent distraction with packs. So that's where we use technology to help us stay on task. It's where there are three types of packs, effort packs, price packs and identity packs. And these pre commitments help us stay on track because if there's one thing I want folks to remember, the one mantra on this book that I think is really the biggest takeaway is that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. We've placed too much emphasis on self-control and willpower. You only wanna use that stuff when you really, really need it. I mean, I wrote this book for me because I've never been one who had a lot of self-control and willpower. That's why I wrote this book because I needed to figure out how to make sure I did what I said I'm going to do. And so the way you do it is not by needing willpower and self-control at all. What you need are systems so that when the time comes, you do the right thing. If the chocolate cake is on its way to your mouth, it's too late. If the cigarette is lit and you're about to take a puff, you've lost. If you're sleeping next to your cell phone on your nightstand, they're gonna get ya. But here's the thing. There's no algorithm that we can't fight against. There's no mind hijacking technology that we can't do something about. If we do something about it in advance, the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. If we plan ahead, we can become indistractable. Now, what is the research saying in terms of some of the side effects of not doing or following some of these steps? Like what's happening right now because people aren't structuring things in a way that's gonna prevent them from getting so distracted? That's Gin Torrey's iGin. Have you read iGin? Gene Twainke? Yeah, I actually did a debate with her at the Colorado Mental Health Institute. God, I should have had you guys all in the room together. It would have been way more fun. Kids are a particularly interesting field and it's one where the research is unbelievably bad, terrible. The research and what you see in terms of the headlines of smart phones are destroying a generation and it's rubbish. So here's the thing. People don't understand the difference between effect and effect size. So lots of things can have an effect, meaning there's correlation between variable X and Y. But that one doesn't say causation, right? Correlation does not prove causation. And it also doesn't tell us very much about the effect size. So these studies that people highlight as, look, people's kid's well-being is decreasing and there's more depression, there's more anxiety, there's more suicide. The effect of social media, there's been studies that actually went back and looked at that data that Gene Twenge used. And there was a study that appeared in Scientific American that found that the effect size of social media use, of screen time on kids was as much as eating potatoes. Much less than the effect of wearing glasses or getting a bad night's sleep. So yes, is there effect? Yes, puny, very, very small. And only for the kids who are using in excessive amounts. We're talking three or four, five hours a day. No study has found that two hours or less of extracurricular age-appropriate screen time has any deleterious effects on kids. So from that, I would say just avoid potatoes. Avoid potatoes, don't eat them. Well, so Nier, with these studies, one thing that I always wonder is, I wonder if there's a bit of a bias because people who are anxious may use these social media tools more anyway. So they might not necessarily be causing the problem, but rather they're just the result of the fact that the person's already feeling a particular way. Absolutely, and we've seen this for years when it comes to addiction research. That we know that people anesthetize themselves with different substances. And so when it comes to kids, this is really what kind of pisses me off about the current debate and how the media loves this story promoting that technology and social media is doing this to kids because it's obfuscating what's really going on. What's really going on, the root cause of the problem is not the technology. It's that our kids are deficient in what's called psychological nutrients. So there's a theory of human motivation called self-determination theory. This is 40, 50-year-old research. It's the most widely accepted and studied theory of human motivation. It's done by Desi and Ryan. So Desi and Ryan say that every human being on the face of the earth in order for psychological flourishing needs three things, three of these psychological nutrients. So we have our macronutrients for our body, carbohydrates, protein, and fat. For our psychological well-being, we need a sense of competency, autonomy, and relatedness. Competency, autonomy, and relatedness. Every one of us needs it, especially our kids. But when we look at the state of children in America today, they are deficient in these three psychological nutrients. So take competency. Along with the rise of the use of technology over the past decade or so, something else has happened, which is the rise of standardized testing. No child left behind started this process in motion. And today, teachers teach towards the test. And so we have a subset of children in this country who are told constantly, you are not competent. And so what do you do when you don't feel competent in the real world? Well, the gaming companies are happy to give you a product that makes you feel like God, play Minecraft, World of Warcraft. You feel like you're in control. You feel incredibly competent, and that feels good, autonomy. So the second thing that we need for psychological well-being, we need the sense of autonomy, freedom, control over our decisions. Well, this is the most regulated generation in American history. Peter Gray found that the average American child today has 10 times as many restrictions placed on them as an adult, twice as many as an incarcerated felon. So there are only two places in society where we can tell people where to go, what to think, what to eat, who to be friends with, and that's prison and school. And so is it any surprise that when kids come home from this hyper-regulated environment, they want freedom, they want control, they want agency? And so where do they go to find it? Well, Fortnite makes you feel free. You can do whatever you want in Fortnite. And then finally, relatedness, probably the most important of the three. We know that being understood by others and having others understand us is absolutely critical for psychological well-being and flourishing. We have to feel relatedness. But it turns out that kids today have are deficient in an activity that is absolutely critical for their well-being, which is free play. There's been a 50-year collapse in the number of hours that kids spend in free play. Totally, 100%. And what's happened, and this has happened for two reasons. One, the media has freaked everybody out in thinking that stranger danger and your kid's gonna get abducted, even though this is the safest time in American history to be a kid. Kids, parents don't let their kids play outside anymore. Last year, there was a couple in Maryland that got arrested for letting their homeschool kids walk one mile to a playground. They were negligent parents for letting their kids go out and explore and play. And so parents are either keeping their kids indoors or we're hyper-scheduling them. And so after school, it's kumon and swimming lessons and Mandarin and they're so hyper-scheduled and they're constantly monitored by either a parent or a coach and there's no time for play. Well, play is where we learn our place in the world. It's one thing if a parent tells a kid, hey, chill out, be nice. It's a whole other thing if a peer says, if you're not nice to me, I'm not gonna play with you, screw you. That is a whole another ballgame. And kids need this. It is as important as the kumon and the test prep and the Mandarin lessons is to give your kid time for free play. And guess what happens if they don't have time for free play? Well, their sense of relatedness is not met. And if it's not met offline, well, they've got Instagram, they've got TikTok, they've got Snapchat. That's where they feel relatedness just like we used to do on the phone when we were growing up. And so that's the real source of the problem. And if we don't tackle that problem, we're not getting to the real issue. We're just blaming a proximal cause. So we're basically looking at a symptom. We're not looking at the cause. You're blowing my mind right now. No, it's making a lot. Incredible, incredible points. I want to circle back to both Adam and Jen and since you know them both and actually have debated them, what are some things you guys see eye to eye and what are things that you're just, no, what are? Okay, so there's a lot more that we see eye to eye on in terms of the practical implications. So it's interesting. So John Hyde is a friend of mine. He wrote the book, Coddling of the American Mind. And we have some disagreements in terms of what's causing the problem, big disagreements in terms of what's causing the problem. I believe it's a symptom, not the cause. But when we sat down together, so we both have, he has a 10 year old, I have an 11 year old daughter. And when we sat down together and we said, well, what do you actually do in your household? It was very similar, funny enough. First rule, if the social media companies tell you that the age restriction of using their products is 13, please listen to them. Why are we letting 10 year olds on Instagram? The company tells you, don't let your kid use this until they're 13. So I think no social media until high school. Maybe even later, there's just no need for it. I think middle school is hard enough without social media. There's no need for that, especially when the companies tell you, don't let your kid use this, okay? Follow what they say. That's the first thing. Then I think what we can do is to start having a conversation with our kids. So what happens when we impose very strict rules and we say, if you go on YouTube, you can find literally thousands of videos of parents smashing their kid's iPhone and kicking the Xbox. And all this terrible stuff, that's not teaching kids how to be responsible. Remember, we're not raising kids, we're raising future adults. And so you can be heavy-handed while they're in the house, you know what they're gonna do in college, you know what they're gonna do after they leave, they're gonna go nuts though. And so the idea is to teach them how to be indestructible today. Well, how do we do that? We start by involving them in the conversation. So when my daughter was five years old, we sat down with her and we said, look, watching a video on your iPad, playing an app, it's not bad for you, okay? It's not melting your brain. We don't need these hysterics in our kid's mind because remember, we also want them to be tech literate. So don't freak your kid out thinking that technology is bad, it's hijacking your brain. No, we want them to be comfortable with technology. But the price of technology, the cost is an opportunity cost. The cost of spending time on the iPad is time not spending time with your friends, not going to the community pool, not playing outside, not spending time with mom and dad. So how much time do you want in your day, given all the things you want to do to spend time on your iPad? And she thought she was getting a deal. She said, how about two episodes? Two episodes on Netflix is 45 minutes. As I said before, two hours or less of extracurricular screen time has no negative effects that we've seen. So I'm fine with that, 45 minutes. But how do you make sure that you abide by your own rule is what I asked her. And she said, well, what if I go to the microwave? We used to have this microwave that was below the countertop. So she could walk up to the microwave, she pushed the timer for 45 minutes. And when the timer beeped, she knew it was time to stop. Now she actually uses Amazon Alexa. She says Alexa set a timer for 45 minutes or she uses Apple screen time. It's built right into the iPad, it's free. And now here's the beauty of it. I'm not the bad guy. I'm not the one saying get off that device. She made a rule for herself. And so I gave her agency autonomy, that psychological need of controlling her decisions so that she can make her own choices and learn how to become indestructible herself. So those are just some quick tips. Now you kind of answered this for me already in terms of kids and free play and how important that is. But for adults, how important is it to apply boredom and live in boredom, make friends with boredom? So I'm not gonna tell people what to do with their time. What I want to help people do is to help them recognize what their values are and then encourage them to turn their values into time. So we talked about earlier this idea of make time for traction. This idea that if you don't know what you want to do with your time, then everything is a distraction. You have to plan your day. So if one of your values is to be the kind of person who takes care of their body, well then great. Make time for going to the gym or taking a walk or doing pushups, whatever it is that is in accordance with your values. If one of your values is to have time for contemplation, then yes, book time to meditate, to go on a walk, to be bored for a little bit. So in this day and age, one of the prices of all of this progress is that there are so many options out there that if you don't plan your day, someone else will, which means that you have to be intentional about having time for reflection, time for boredom, time to do these things, or it's not gonna happen. But if it's important to you, I say absolutely schedule time for it. What does the research say on how the brain models itself after being switching from app to app and getting those dopamine hits, as they would say in some of these other books, is the research to show that the brain starts to adapt in a way to maybe become less excited for normal things because you're looking at things that are designed to hit those neural sweet spots or whatever? Well, anytime, so anytime you hear folks talk about dopamine pathways, we should have our spidey senses kick in. Because there's a neuroscience joke, I'm sure you're not gonna find this funny, but the neuroscience joke goes, what's the role of dopamine in the brain? The role of dopamine is to confuse neuroscientists because dopamine does a lot of things. The way the media talks about dopamine is like it's cocaine. Dopamine is not cocaine, okay? Dopamine squirts are not a hit. It's not how it works. Dopamine is released whenever we learn a behavior. When you learn to play the piano, dopamine, when you watch a movie and it's fun, it's interesting, it's exciting, dopamine. When you fall in love, dopamine, it's everywhere. Anytime we learn a behavior. But just because dopamine is released doesn't mean it's creating an addiction. Now, the dopamine system is involved in addiction, but it's not what causes addiction. And so it's very different. Our behaviors with a device are very, very different than a substance that enters the body and breaks the blood-brain barrier. We're not injecting Instagram. We're not free-basing Facebook here. It's a whole nother category. Not yet. Not yet. I wanna make that a thing. We're not plugging into the matrix quite yet. Free-basing. So there's no research. So I'll use another example. I've read studies, and maybe you can correct me on this if I'm wrong, but I've read studies on how pornography reduces the stimulus that especially young males will get from real life. So you see erectile dysfunction increases in young men because of the use of pornography where it's so novel that real life doesn't get them excited anymore. Does something like that similar happen when we're using other forms of technology where real life becomes more boring because other things are more exciting? Well, for some people, that's the case. So this is where I think the conversation gets a little muddy because a technology can be addictive and not addict everyone. So building a tolerance is one of these traits of how we know someone has an addiction, that they need more and more of that stimulus, whether it's a substance, whether it's a behavior, if it's a gambling disorder, et cetera. But there's a big difference between the kind of person who that happens to and everyone else. And so, and we know this to be true across the board, right? This shouldn't be a revelation because if you think about alcohol, right? A lot of us have a beer with dinner. We're not all alcoholics. Not everyone who has sex is a sex addict. Not everyone who gambles is a problem gambler if we played poker once in a while. And yet some people do go overboard. Some people do have this insatiable, uncontrollable dependence on a behavior or substance that harms them. That's the nature of addiction. So some people do have that tendency. And it turns out that addiction is never just about the substance. And we've been fighting this perception for quite a long time. I mean, this is, you know, Nancy Reagan saying, just say no, that it's just about the drugs is just as ridiculous today as it was in the 1980s. It's never just about the drugs. Nobody steps on a heroin needle and becomes a heroin addict. That's not how it works. Millions of women every year are given fentanyl. Fentanyl, the most addictive substance we know of when they get a caesarean section. But a tiny, tiny proportion, if fentanyl is so addictive, why don't they all come out as junkies? They don't because it's never just about the substance. A tiny percentage of those women ever become addicted to fentanyl. So addiction is a confluence of three factors. One is the product, one is the addictive substance, but there's two other factors. The other thing is the person, right? So when people have a predilection for addiction, we know that particularly in children, I spoke with many experts who study internet use disorder or what they're calling gaming disorder today. And what these professionals told me is that across the board, 100% of the children that they treat with his gaming use disorder, 100% of them have comorbidity with something else going on. Obsessive compulsive disorder, severe trauma, something else was going on in their life. They're using it to medicate. That's right, bingo. So there's some, and a lot of times there's obsessive compulsive disorder is very highly correlated with addiction disorder as well. That, you know, across substances, that there's something about individuals, whether it's, we don't know if it's genetics, what's exactly going on. Some people do appear to have a propensity towards addiction. But there's a third component and that third component, along with the product, the person, the third component is the pain. That we know that when people are passing through periods of their life, when they have intense pain that they cannot otherwise cope with, one of the strategies they use is to self-medicate. So there were studies done on Vietnam vets. You know, in 1960s, we had a generation of soldiers coming back from Vietnam. About a third of them were, at the time, according to these studies, addicted to heroin, or some kind of substance. And there was a real fear in the Nixon administration that when these veterans came home, they would continue to use, and this would create a drug epidemic in this country. But it never happened. Because when these veterans came home, the vast majority of them stopped using heroin because they were no longer in the hellscape of the Vietnam War. And without the need to escape psychologically, without that pain in their life that they were looking to escape. And with the support system of their family, their jobs, their kids, all of these things that they needed to help them cope with pain in a normal, healthy fashion, they didn't need the substance anymore. So to that point, let's talk about the potential future then. We made, you made the point already, and I think this is such a good point, that we're eliminating free play. We're putting more restriction on kids. The gaming industry and all these tools are getting better. And I think we can agree that technology continues to get better. And that which would include that making the properties of them more addictive or more fun to play, however you want to say it, and rewarding those kids, giving them that freedom. I mean, what do you think about what's gonna happen in the next 10 years? Are we gonna get worse before we get better? What are your thoughts? I mean, I see a movie like Ceregates and I can't help but think like, you know, will we end up like this where the virtual world is more fun or more rewarding for most people than it is being in reality? Like, is that a possibility of our future? Anything's possible. Right. I do think that the world is probably going to become more potentially distracting. And I do think that the world is going to bifurcate into people who decide, no, my attention and my life is gonna be controlled by me. Those people are called indistractable. And people who aren't aware that their attention and their lives are being manipulated by others. And it's not just the tech companies. It's your kids can be distractions, your spouse can be a distraction, your boss can be a distraction. The news can be a distraction. Lots of things can be distractions in your life. And I think that there will be this bifurcation of people who realize what's going on, realize that they're being pulled to do things they don't necessarily want to do in the later regret versus those that say, okay, I want to plan my attention and plan my life. And I do think definitely that there is the possibility that as technology becomes more pervasive and persuasive, it likely will become more distracting. However, that being said, there's no technology that I've seen to date, who knows what's gonna happen in the future, that we can't do something about with forethought. The technology is good, it's not that good. I agree, I mean, my theory, my belief is that, and I've been saying this for a long time on the show, that we're going to have this split. And I don't know if it's gonna be right down the middle or what, and then we'll have what I call plugged in, and then the unplugged. There'll be a half of the population or whatever that hears what you're saying, takes heed to it and says, hey, we need to take control of our lives. I want to live amongst people and interact with real people. And then there'll be the other half of the population that says, life is miserable, but it's amazing in this virtual world. And I don't want it. I've already tried to be with other people and this is so much better, I don't fuck it. I'd rather be plugged in all day long and live in this world instead. Do you believe that's a possibility? But to some degree, that's not all bad. It's bad if you think that there are people who became this way, that they became techno hermits. I would argue that there have always been people who are shy, who are socially isolated and who find solace and comfort and connection through online means, right? You know how many folks- You could argue that it could save lives, right? It absolutely does save lives. People that were gonna be suicidal that are now finding pleasure in connecting online now. Absolutely. I remember so in the early 90s, my brother came out. And back then, I remember that coming out was a big deal. Like I grew up in central Florida, a very conservative part of the country. I mean, if I didn't like your hat, that hat's gay. That's what people would say. I mean, it was the term. It was just totally different from how we thought of it today. Being gay was such a terrible thing. And I went to my guidance counselor at my middle school. I was in middle school at the time when I found out and I was just, I was wrecked. And all I could do is talk to this guidance counselor who was not all that helpful. But today, you know, through the miracle of these online technologies, I could have gone to an online forum of LGBTQ friends of people who are LGBTQ and I could have met with other people who are struggling with the same stuff. So we talk about all the bad stuff that technology does but we don't really give credit to all the good stuff it does as well. You know, one of the things that talk about the debate I had with Jean Twengy about her book, iGen, you know, we show one chart in terms of suicide among teens has risen, it's true. But what they don't show you is the rest of the graph. If you start the graph from 2012, that was a historic record low for teen suicide in this country. And so you see a rise. But if you go back far enough to the 1980s, it was about as same as it is today. Oh, no shit. Yes, yes. I hate those. I hate wanting to do that shit. Gosh, that's true. It gets worse. It gets worse. Not only that, if we say, okay, the tech is doing it to our kids, then we would expect wherever there is the tech, wherever there's social media, we should see an equal rise. Well, it's only happening in America and the UK and no other OECD countries not happening in Japan. They've had tech longer than these types of technologies longer than we have not happening in Nordic countries, not happening in most of Europe. They've had the same social networks. They've had the same cell phones, no increase in suicide. Furthermore, it's not even happening in a geographically distributed way in America. Teen suicide is not rising in urban areas. It's only rising in rural areas, in the heartland. Why? If it's the technology doing it to us. In fact, kids in urban areas have a greater rates of cell phone penetration. There's something happening in the heartland in this country, some kind of cancer that we don't understand. And we blame, we put all the data together and we cut and slice and dice the graphs the way we want and then we say, oh, an easy solution to a big problem. It's the new boogeyman. Yes, exactly. You're blowing my mind right now. Absolutely blowing my mind. And one other thing that popped up for me as you were talking about this is I think of how fast movements take hold today versus before because of technology. I mean, in 2008, there wasn't a single mainstream politician that would campaign for gay marriage, back on that topic. Not a single one. Barack Obama was against gay marriage when he campaigned to become the president. Four years later, it was political suicide to hold that position. You had to campaign for in support of gay marriage. And that is because of technology. Marijuana legalization, never would have happened now because of technology and the fact that information gets spread so quickly. These movements happen very, very quickly. So I think when we're talking about this, how technology is rising so quickly, I think identifying the abuse of them is probably gonna happen faster. I mean, the fact that we're having this conversation right now and it hasn't been around super long, wasn't that long ago that nobody had a cell phone? Right. You know, it was what, a generation, not even a go. We remember that, right? It's our lifetime. Now, what do you think about this? Here's one other fear that people have is that because social media's algorithms are designed to kind of give you more of what you want, that people are less exposed to differing opinions, to different ways of thinking. And some people will say it's making people more extreme. So like if you're a liberal, for example, all the news you're gonna get is gonna confirm what you think and you're gonna get less and less stuff telling the opposite. Because you watch Fox News all day? Now, is that true? Well, I'm saying it half joking here because what's new here? Right. We blame social media for filter bubbles and only exposing us to one viewpoint. Let's go back a few years to cable news, right? People who watch Fox News all day long as their only source of news, they are also seeing only one side of the story. Go back even further. There's a quote that says that Sunday is the most segregated day of the week because when people went to their churches, they would hear an opinion before the days of mass media, they would hear the opinion of the parishioner, of the leader of that congregation and they would hear one point of view. So filter bubbles are nothing new. This has happened for a very, very long time. And if anything, I think what this is exposed, again, you know, back to that Paul Verrillo quote, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck and what you said about how young these companies are, these companies are teenagers, right? Facebook started in 2006. So these are brand new companies, you know, 13, 14 years old companies, they're not very big. And we are experienced with these companies is very much also like a teenager with alcohol. So, you know, when you first try booze, you go a little overboard, you wake up the next morning, you have a bad hangover and you said, oh, I'm never gonna do that again. And we're doing as that as a society, let's regulate these guys, let's shut them down. That's what we're all saying because we have this social media hangover. But that's not the right answer. You don't stick with that for very long. You grow up and you learn how to hold your liquor and you learn how to use it responsibly. And that's what we are going through right now as a society. And so what's happening? Look, we are learning now, and I think the message has gotten out there that if your only source of news is Facebook and Twitter, something's wrong, right? Can we all agree that's kind of a shitty place to get your news every day? Sure, it's even a joke that my buddies and I have. Why don't you get that Twitter? Exactly, exactly. So when it comes with something on one side, way hard, that's what we say to each other. And once again, we've been here before, the National Enquirer, the National Enquirer at one point was a legitimate newspaper. Now, if somebody says, oh, I get my news through the National Enquirer, you're a moron, right? Yeah, Wolf Boy was born yesterday. Exactly. And that's exactly what, so people aren't stupid. We realize the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal is a bit more credible than what you see in your Facebook news feed and you filter that out. And in fact, technology is facilitating dialogue because I think most of us, you know, we talk about the fringe people who only watch Fox News or only watch MSNBC or only watch one source. But I think the vast majority of people do value a conversation. I mean, everybody tuning in today values a conversation. We value a conversation. And technology facilitates that as well. I mean, there's this website, I think it's called changemymind.com or something like that, changemyopinion.com where it's just this forum of people having a discussion. Reddit does this all the time as well. I've seen stuff like this where they'll have a topic and then they'll pick the top best debates, you know, arguments on either side of it. In fact, I visit websites like that all the time. Exactly. I think they're really, really valuable. And it turns out so does everybody else too except for the fringes. There are always fringes. But I think most people in our society, thankfully do want a perspective. And one thing I'm very much against regulating having government interference in these technologies because that's like giving the devil the keys. Like if you, then if you really want to see it get manipulated. Who says they can do it better? Yeah, yeah, give it to the people who have the ability to legislate and throw people in prison. It's a great point. It's a great point. And another thing that we talked about in that debate around kids, another graph that blew my mind the more I researched it. You know, we only show that one graph of suicide going up when we talked about why that graph isn't exactly the best graph to look at. What they don't show you is that every other metric of kids' health and safety today is amazing. So much better. Yeah. If you look at murder rates, truancy, pregnancy, drug use, all of these things are at record lows. Literally the graphs are like this. California has prisons empty. This was the generation of the super predator. Remember the super predator? This is supposed to be the generation. It's supposed to be happening right now. It's not happening. Well, let's think for a second. Why is that? Well, maybe part of it, if we're gonna blame technology for the bad stuff, maybe it's also the fact that instead of, you know, doing the crap that we used to do as teenagers, right, the vandalism or violence, whatever kids used to do as kids, now they're indoors playing games. So if you wanted to invent a device to keep kids safe at home off the streets, maybe an iPhone is not such a bad device. No, it's interesting you bring that up because we just had recently, somebody try to kidnap somebody in our local community, but everybody shared that information and shared the drawing of this person. And then he was apprehended within a couple hours. And it's just like, you know, it wouldn't happen. They would have put posters up and just hope for the best. Wow, that's, that is a good point. Are you familiar with the website humanprogress.org? No. Okay, so phenomenal website. And it was designed to counter all the bad scary news. And so if you go on there, it shows like, oh, you know, we've lifted more people out of poverty in the last three decades than all of human history, you know, that, you know, literacy rates are going through the roof. But a lot of people don't know about it because it's easy to scare the shit out of people. It's really hard to do the opposite. That's right. Do you feel like you're just fighting a pill battle? Yes, yes. And what's so ironic that I think a lot of folks don't realize is that when the New York Times or the Atlantic publishes an article that's fear-mongering, that just shows one side of the story, smartphones are destroying a generation. They're in the same goddamn business as Facebook. They're monetizing your eyeballs. They are attention merchants. What business do you think Facebook is in? Same business, they sell ads. And so that's why they keep promoting the story. So when I write a story and I get published on the Atlantic, it doesn't get as many clicks because my stories are about, hey, guess what, things aren't actually so bad guys. Nobody wants to hear that. That's not sexy though. No, your TED talk doesn't even have enough views. It should have way more views than what it has. And so I've come to peace knowing that I don't want, I don't need everyone. I don't need the sensationalists. I want the people who want both sides and can make up their own minds. That's why I love podcasts so much because, I mean, thank goodness that we have this medium because I can't tell my story in a 30 second sound bite. A 30 second sound bite is, technology is hijacking your brain. Yeah, you lost. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I have to sit down with you for maybe not 30, you know, maybe not 30 seconds, maybe three minutes. I need to show you a little bit of information, a little bit of data, tell you about the whole story. And now you say, oh, okay, maybe there's another side. Well, I tell you what, Nir, you're blowing my mind. I love everything that you're saying, but I think what you need to do is work with like political strategists and figure out how to make what you're saying scary. Yeah, yeah, yeah, super scary. If you don't do what I'm saying, then this is what's gonna, or something like that. Nir, did you, the debate with Jen, was that videoed anywhere? Yes, yeah, it's on my website. It is. Yeah. Oh, awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Put your website. It's nirandfar.com, nir, spelled like my first name, n-i-r, n-i-r, n-i-r, n-i-r, n-i-r, n-i-r, n-i-r, n-i-r, n-i-r. All right, we'll make sure to put that in the show notes. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Yeah, great perspective. No, this is excellent, and it's funny. It's like almost every topic that we tend to get so freaked out about ends up like this. And if you really look at, and this has been something I've talked about for a long time, if you look at how humans we tend to get better, we're pretty smart. Yeah, we're pretty smart. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't point out the problems. And there are real problems with technology. Absolutely. I just don't think we should focus on the wrong problems. Let's focus on the real problems here. And to your point earlier about what's the fear, I think the fear is when we spread this untruth that technology is addicting us, that it's hijacking our brains, that there's nothing we can do that's irresistible, that is actually the danger. Because of this aspect of learned helplessness. When we perpetuate this idea that there's nothing you can do, people don't do anything about it. They don't take responsibility for themselves and do these very simple things. Exactly, exactly. Perfect. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Nir. My pleasure. That was excellent. Thank you.