← The Dr. Hyman Show
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- [00:00]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.
- [00:03]
Cal Newport
So the more you social media, the less you do actual real interaction and the worse and worse. Ironically, your loneliness actually gets to be on these phones all the time. That is the cognitive equivalent of junk food. These intense addictive forms of distraction have a long term effect on your cognitive health.
- [00:19]
Dr. Mark Hyman
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- [01:55]
Jonathan Haidt
So we have a major and it's not just America, it's all the English speaking countries. For sure, it seems to be most of the developed world. Across the developed world we're seeing suddenly in the early 2010s, teens are getting more depressed and anxious and so this was a side project for me. But as I began to dig into it and to realize that it's international, to realize that more and more studies are coming out showing not just a correlation but but we're beginning to get experiments Experiments where you randomly assign one group of college students to reduce their social media for a month, another group doesn't, you see what happens. So once you have correlational studies and experimental studies and you have massive eyewitness testimony from Gen Z, go find me. I cannot find. Find me an essay online, Find me an essay anywhere by a member of Gen Z who defends the phones, who says, oh no, it's been great for us. Oh no, the phone based life has been great. Don't take it away from us. You can't find that, but you find thousands of essays about how it destroyed me, it destroyed my generation, destroyed my childhood. And we have massive eyewitness testimony from the teachers. The teachers all hate the phones. I mean, I don't know about all, but you know, 90% in surveys say this is a problem. 80, 90%, same thing for school principals. So we have all these different kinds of evidence converging on the fact that this really rapid movement of childhood from normal sort of play to and social interaction onto the phones is not just a correlate of the collapse of mental health around the world, teen mental health, but a cause.
- [03:22]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, well, you know, I think there was a sort of an attempt to rebut this by Candace Odgers in Nature. And you on X basically replied to that kind of rebutting a lot of what you said, which was that there was no cause of evidence. And you talk about a lot of the data that you cite, which is both experimental and observational data that kind of lay out the reality that this is not just some correlation.
- [03:50]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, that's right. So a few pieces to the argument. The first, as I said, there is experimental evidence and a meta analysis came out six or eight months ago showing yeah, some experiments show a big effect or an effect, some experiments don't. It's kind of up in the air. But my research partner and I, Zach Rausch, we're reanalyzing all the experiments and actually when you remove the short term experiments, this is the key. Some of the experiments ask people to get off social media for a day or two days. And if you're addicted to something, you know, do you think quitting heroin or cocaine is a good idea? Well, you know, yeah, but if you quit it for a day or two, it's going to be pretty bad. You have to wait. It takes, you know, two, you know, Anna Lemke says three or four weeks. But you know, I think we're seeing effects by, you know, by a week or two. You're getting over the roughest part. So the trick is when you remove the one day studies and you just look at those that went longer than a week, overwhelmingly they find that there are benefit, there are mental health benefits to getting off social media. So Adger said that I have only correlational evidence, which is false. I keep saying, no, look, here's the experimental evidence and the other thing that I think is very powerful is that this happened around the world at the same time. And you know, most people say, oh, height is trying to make us bark up the wrong tree. We're going to be looking into phones and banning phones for little kids when what we should be looking at is, you know, X, Y and Z. And X, Y and Z is usually inequality and climate change and racism and Donald Trump and things like that. It's usually something about America.
- [05:19]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Probably all of it adds to the soup for sure.
- [05:22]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, fine. But, but, but why, what changed in Obama's second term? Why was it that during Obama's first term with the financial crisis, things were fine for teenagers, mental health was normal, it didn't change in his first term. Then all of a sudden in his second term, what suddenly like racism or school shootings? That's the other thing that people say 2012 was the Newtown massacre. So that does fit the timing because after that kids had lockdown drills. Fine, if it was just the US if 2012 was the turning point in the US but not anywhere else, then I'd say, yeah, you know what, you could be right about that. But the fact that teenage girls start checking into psychiatric emergency wards at much higher rates, not just in the U.S. but in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK that's just not compatible with any other theory. No one can come up with another explanation that fits internationally other than the great rewiring of childhood that happened between 2010 and 2015.
- [06:18]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And that rewiring that you're talking about essentially is the advent of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram that then drove not.
- [06:26]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, we have to be more specific because Facebook comes out in 2004 and it's 2003.
- [06:31]
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's when they put the like and the share buttons. Right?
- [06:34]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. So, so we have, let's just trace it out. And actually this is very, very important for people understanding why this time is different. So the Internet comes out, the public gets access to it. In the mid-1990s, you know, I remember the first time I saw a Web browser was AltaVista and I almost dropped to the floor in shock and awe. Like, you mean, I can just like ask for something and it comes to me instantly. I don't have to get in my car and go to the library. Like anything like omniscience crazy, you know, it was totally crazy. It was magical. And in the 90s, the teenagers who were Gen Z, I mean, who were millennials, they took to the Internet, they were on AOL and you know, AIM and, and their mental health was fine. The early Internet was decentralized, it was fun, it was exploratory, it was amazing. And so we all think, well this is good and our kids are spending time on and that's good, we think. And then you get into the 2000s now remember everything's dial up so there's no video. Slow connection speeds, it's just like text. You didn't have photographs early on. Now you get into the 2000s now you get fiber optic cable laid everywhere in the world and things speeds are speeding up and you get social media. Now we're beginning to get a more centralized Internet. Many young people won't know that the Internet was not dominated by three or four companies for the first decade or so. It was a wide open space. Now three or four companies basically control our kids consciousness. You know, Instagram, tick tock, YouTube, a few others account for I think the majority of what they're doing with their day.
- [08:06]
Dr. Mark Hyman
For a lot of it's basically tick tock, Google Meta and.
- [08:11]
Jonathan Haidt
That's right, that's right. And especially the short videos. That's right, yeah. X is not so important for, for adolescents it's there and it's important for democracy, but it's not. X does not seem to be playing a role in the mental health issues. It's the short videos and as video content especially. Anyway, so, so 2003 you get Facebook, but it's only for college students at first and it's not particularly toxic. In the late 2000s you begin to get. So you get the iPhone in 2007, which is an amazing digital Swiss army knife. It's not harmful. There are apps, but there's no app store, no push notifications. So all the way up to 28, 2008, 2009, the situation is not particularly toxic. It's getting interesting, it's getting more engaging, but it's not, it's not like what we know now. And teen mental health is fine up until 2011. There's no sign of a problem before 2011. In 2009 you get the like and the retweet buttons. And now Facebook and Twitter are able to algorithmicize Everything, because you get share buttons as well. So retweet, share. So now social media becomes much more about the newsfeed. Before then it was called, they were called social networking systems. You just connect with people, you see their page, they see yours. Connecting people is generally good thing, but now it's about the news feed, which is algorithmicized to fit you and keep you on. Facebook literally rewarded its engineers for increasing engagement time. That was the metric. If you can keep people on longer.
- [09:42]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You get paid, you get a bonus.
- [09:44]
Jonathan Haidt
You get a bonus.
- [09:44]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
- [09:45]
Jonathan Haidt
And so, you know, very smart people, they did it, they found ways to keep young people especially on longer. And that was the news feed and the algorithms. Much more emotionally engaging content is selected. So in 20, at the beginning of 2010, very few teens have a smartphone. They mostly have flip phones. They're using Facebook on their dad's computer. They don't have high speed Internet. It's not dial up at that point, but it's not very fast. They don't have Instagram. It doesn't exist on January 1, 2010. There's no front facing camera on January 1, 2010. In 2010 you get the front facing camera and Instagram takes a couple years before everyone has it. In 2012, Facebook buys Instagram, doesn't change it at first, but that's when it gets huge publicity. That's when girls social life, teen girl social life moves on to Instagram. It wasn't on it, it wasn't there before. The point is that by 2015, the great majority of teens in developed countries have a smartphone with a front facing camera and an Internet Instagram account and high speed Internet with an unlimited data plan. In 2010, you could not spend 10 hours a day on your flip phone. I mean that would just be hell. But in 2015, you can spend 10 hours a day on your smartphone. And now that's about the average. 8 to 10 hours a day is what teens now spend on on their phones. That includes video games. But, but it's mostly phone and it's mostly consuming videos. So that's why I call it the Great rewiring of childhood. In 2010, kids use flip phones to connect and see each other in person. In 2015, that's largely what's not gone, but it reduces greatly. And life is now you sit on your bed scrolling and then your mom calls you down for dinner. That's now. That's a lot of teen life now.
- [11:33]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, it's pretty depressing just to talk about this because it's happening almost Invisibly, in a way that's sort of at a subtext in our culture. And the consequences haven't fully been realized in downstream effects on the physical and mental health of the kids who are now growing up in this generation and the consequences of that for their behavior. And I think the data is pretty striking. I mean, the data basically showed that. This is JAMA Pediatrics. From 2005 to 2017, the rate of adolescents reporting symptoms of major depression increased by 52%. Those 12 to 17 who experienced a major depression in that same period went from 8.7% to 15.7% from 2005 to 2019. And the heavy use of social media also has been correlated in Lancet papers and others. And to be really correlated or even potentially causal with this. And so the costs of this are staggering. I mean, just economically, the cost of depression and mental health is the major driver of the total cost of care to society. Not, not actually hospitalization, necessary medication, but just when you count disability and loss of quality of life years, it's the single biggest driver of, of cost to society. And, and, and it's just beginning. It feels like we're just at the beginning of this. And what's, what's coming around the corner is even worse because we haven't fully realized the consequences of what's just happened over the last, I mean, 10 years, right? 10, 15 years. It's very quick. And your work really sort of underscores that this is an issue, but you also talk about what needs to be done to kind of solve it. And some of the things you talk about seem easy, but they also seem ambitious. In other words, getting phones out of schools, no phones for teenagers until they're 16, no smartphones, um, you know, making sure kids get out and play. I mean, all the stuff that we did when we were kids. I mean, you, you and I are about the same age. And I mean, you know, I, I was like 7 years old, had my bicycle and left after school, and my parents didn't see me till dinner and run around the neighborhood. I mean, and, and yet, you know, they seem very simple in terms of these, these solutions. But I, I can't imagine how you, how you imagine they're going to get implemented because of the resistance and, and the change in behavior, right?
- [14:04]
Jonathan Haidt
No, not. It's actually amazingly easy. I'm shocked at how easy this is. I've been involved in a lot of efforts at social change. I ran a gun control group in college, a handgun control group in college, and that was completely Hopeless. And we made no progress. It's very difficult to persuade people of things. But here, the reason why we're going to be successful, where we're being successful is that we don't have to persuade people they already know. Almost everyone who's a parent sees this. Almost all the principals and teachers see it. The child psych, everyone sees it. So I don't have to persuade anyone. What I had to do in my book is give a clear diagnosis. Here is exactly what happened, when it happened and why. Here are the psychological mechanisms, here are the developmental pathways that get blocked. Here's the way puberty works, here's the way the brain changes during puberty. So people needed a kind of a more complete understanding of what's happening. They needed to understand the history, how the Internet was amazing in the 90s, but the Internet we have now is nothing like the Internet we had in the 90s. And then people. The key thing that I think I did in the book that's really bringing about collective action is I analyzed this all in terms of collective action problems. Why is it that 10 year olds now have phones, have their own smartphone, and the answer is because that your 10 year old comes home and said in fifth grade and says, mom, everyone else has a phone, I need an iPhone. And you say, well no, but I gave you a phone watch or I gave you a flip phone, you can call me if you need. No, no, no, everyone has an iPhone. They're making fun of me. And then so you, then you give in and you give your kid an iPhone. Well, once 90% of the kids have an iPhone, then everyone has to have one or they will be left out. So we got into this so deeply because it's a collective action problem. And this is the key to why it's so painful for kids. Because social media is socially addictive. Now. It is biologically addictive. To some heavy users. Dopamine circuits get rewired. For some, we can say it's biologically addictive. But for the great majority of teens, they're on it not because their brain says they must be on it to feel normal, but because everyone else is on it. They can't quit. I talk to my students at nyu, they waste huge amounts of time. They don't want to waste all this time say, why don't you just delete it? I can't because everyone else is on it. I have to know what's going on. So these things are socially addictive. And so what I did in the book, they said once we Understand the nature of collective action problems where if everyone is on it and you step off alone, you bear a cost and you don't make anything better for anyone else. But what if 10% of people get off? Well, now they have each other. Now they're not alone, they have each other. And then now it becomes possible to imagine not having a phone in fifth grade. And now some parents will say, no, you're not. You know, there's a pledge called the wait until eighth pledge, which is actually wait until after eighth, wait until ninth, really? Because my argument has been we have to get kids through middle school. Middle school is early puberty, really important period of brain development, the worst possible period to hook kids up to TikTok and have weirdos around the world being their source of cultural information. We've got to keep this out of kids lives at least until high school. So you know, the wait until 8th pledge is a way to solve the collective action problem. Parents sign up when their kid is in elementary school. They say, I'm not going to get my kid a phone until 9th grade. Smartphone, you can give them a phone, watch, give them a flip phone. And then once 10 people, I think it's or 50 people in each school sign up, something like that, then the pledge goes into effect. And so this is why we are being successful. And I used to say we're going to be successful, but that was back in March and April. Now it's clear we are being successful. And the reason is because schools all over the country, everyone hated the phones. I mean, it's impossible to teach when, I mean, imagine when you and I were kids, if they said, you know, you can bring in your TV set, you can bring in your vcr, you can bring in your painty, your paint by numbers kit, you can bring, you bring in anything, everything, have it right with you in your pocket on your desk while I'm trying to teach you. Go ahead. Like insanity. So phone free schools is happening very, very fast. Los Angeles school districts are going phone free. New York City is going to announce in a couple of weeks the state of Virginia. I forget which other states have done truly phone free. Some states just say, oh, you can't use your phone in class, which is nonsense because then you have to use it between classes. So that's terrible. But some states are going truly phone free. From bell to bell, you turn in your phone in the morning. This is happening at lightning pace. I have never seen social change happen this fast. So on the schools we already are successful every day I'm getting notes from parents saying thank you. Your book gave me the courage to let my 7 year old ride his bicycle to his friend's house or ride it up and down our street. And now other kids are riding their bicycles. So it's a collective action problem. And parents are ready for change. Not all, but a lot are ready for change. And once they start and their kids are out having fun together, more parents are going to say, oh, it's kind of creepy for you to just be sitting here all day long scrolling, why don't you go out and play? And I think that's going to happen over the next year or two.
- [19:02]
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's incredible, John. I mean, I think, I think it's hard to imagine something happening that fast, but it seems like there's a sort of global awareness about that there's a problem and you point a path to a solution that people are jumping on. And the interesting thing is what's going to happen, you know, between when they leave school and they go home and they go to bed, because that doesn't stop the problem. They have a smartphone when they get home. So do you think that.
- [19:27]
Jonathan Haidt
No, but it kind of does. It kind of does. Because the, the issue with the smartphone is that you have it with you always. And so because anything you can do on a smartphone you can do on a computer if you have a laptop at home. And you know, most nowadays, you know, middle school kids, they need a computer, access to a computer. So if you have, you know, ideally, you know, if parents have like one desktop computer in the living room or the kitchen or someplace, I think that's great, that's very safe. The kid's not going to get into porn. They're not going to get seduced by sextortionist rings. So having access to a computer is great, but that's just going to be for, you know, an hour to a day at most. When you have the phone, you can get 16 hours a day. And that's what some of the kids are getting, 16 hours a day. How is that possible? Because when they're on the bus, they're doing this. When they're in class, they're doing this. When they're on the bathroom, they're doing this. One teenager told me now that iPhones are waterproof. Kids are taking them into the shower. So you can keep scrolling or doing things while you're taking a shower. Okay, so can't we just delay that till high school? Can't we just let kids get through early puberty without having that?
- [20:35]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, it's quite striking. You know, I think you talk a lot about kids, but I would also sort of point out that there's been a significant increase in depression and anxiety among adults as well. It's not just kids.
- [20:48]
Jonathan Haidt
Let's talk about that. Wait, wait. Let's just tell me what you've seen, because what Zach Rauch and I do is we have all these graphs of all the data sets we can find, all the longitudinal studies. Some of them allow us to break it up by age. And what we generally find is that when you track levels of. At least I've only done depression anxiety. I haven't done everything. But when you look at depression anxiety for people over 40 or 50, there's no change. They are, of course, we all feel frazzled. We feel there's too much stuff coming in. We're all hooked on our phones. But levels of depression anxiety are not really rising for older people. For Gen Z, it's a hockey stick. Gen z is born 1996 and later hockey stick. Huge. For the millennials, it's in between. And I need to try to break it up by early millennial versus late millennial. It might just be that those born in millennial Generation is usually 1981 through 1995. And it might just be that it's the millennials who were born in the early 90s. They had this stuff when they were late teenagers. It might just be them. But as far as I can see, for depression anxiety, it's really a Gen Z and a little bit millennial thing. It's not a Gen X and older thing. But you tell me, do you know. Do you know specific?
- [21:56]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, the WHO basically says between 2005 and 2015, there was about an 18% increase in depression in kids. It was more right in youth. It was 52% between 2005 and 2017. So it's certainly more in kids. I agree.
- [22:12]
Jonathan Haidt
And it's much more in girls. Wait, so. So you can say if you look at a nation, you'll see an increase, but if you must always break this stuff up by gender. Always. Because sometimes the effect is entirely limited to girls. Sometimes it's just bigger in girls. So if you take. So the increase for younger females is gigantic. The increase for other groups is not nearly so large.
- [22:35]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And how do you sort of see this playing out in the future of our country and society? And as kids sort of are hooked on social media, on the Internet, that's affecting them, and hopefully your efforts will actually lead to sort of a reduction in this because of the prohibitions in school. But where do you see this going? I mean, it just seems like we're heading kind of a slow motion disaster.
- [23:01]
Jonathan Haidt
We were heading in a slow motion disaster. And by 2019, when I was really beginning to get into this and Gene Twenge was writing about this, we were beginning to point out, like, wait, we just did this gigantic uncontrolled experiment and now the results are in. Look, things are going really, really badly. 2019, and then Covid hits and everybody, you know, in 2019, I was saying what kids really, really need is a lot less time on screens and a lot more time outside playing. That's what we need to do. And Covid comes. What do we do? How about a lot more time on screens and no time outside playing? Because we thought you could get Covid outdoors and you can't touch people. You know, we got it all wrong with kids. We really made Covid so much worse for kids than it. Than it had to be. But that confused us all. And of course, the kids were on screens all day long. You know, they had to be on zoom. And it was really discouraging and dispiriting, but that's what they had to do. And so now that Covid has receded, now we can see the wreckage, we see the gigantic rates. And you know, while numbers have come, some numbers come down a little bit from the peak in Covid, but in a sense they're really just returning to the trend line that would have been if Covid never happened. So. So now it's become becoming obvious. So I don't think it's going to be a slow motion disaster from here on in. I think we're at a cultural turning point and we're now seeing this is not light, playful stuff that lets kids be creative. This is not that. That's what Facebook and others have sold us on. Sure, they can do that. That is part of the experience. That is true. But, you know, a lot of it is talking with strange men who are trying to get photos of you in a bikini or who are trying to extort you or trying to, you know, people trying to sell you things. Like it's complete insanity that we let you know, as I say in the book, we have overprotected our children in the real world. We have underprotected them online. Both were mistakes. We have to reverse both. And we're going to. So I think we're at a cultural turning point where we're seeing this is not this light, playful thing. This is not the early Internet that I remember from my 20s. This is. We need to think of this much more like alcohol or tobacco or automobiles or gambling or strip clubs or whatever. There are all sorts of things that we let adults do, but we don't let children do. And in general, the reason why we put age gates on the reason why we block children from doing things is either sex, violence, addiction, or physical harm or other kinds of illness. Those are five reasons. If something's dangerous for kids or it's sex and violence or addiction, we tend to say no. You know, 12 year olds can't do this. Even 16 year olds can't do this. You have to be 18 or 21 to do this. Social media hits all five.
- [25:33]
Dr. Mark Hyman
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- [26:02]
Cal Newport
The positive social media articles. What they're essentially finding is in isolation. There are certain things that happen on social media that make you happier than if you weren't doing them. So if I put you in a room, for example, and say, do nothing or send a note to a close friend or family member on social media, you'll be a little bit happier having sent a note to a friend or family member than doing nothing. Now, it turns out that actually talking to a non close friend or broadcasting information to a large audience or reading information that was broadcast to a large audience, none of this, even in isolation, makes you happier. But there's a few things in isolation.
- [26:37]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So now your Facebook friends, but your actual friends.
- [26:40]
Cal Newport
Your actual friends and family, yeah. At the same token, though, the sort of best research we have that looks at the core correlation between social media use in your life and indicators like perceived loneliness or social isolation say that the more you use it, the less happy you are. Even when you do all of the standard controls that you would do for all the different demographic and economic variables that you think might be relevant. And so what's going on? Right, this seems like they're countervailing. And what's probably happening, what the researchers thinks that's happening, is that you get a little boost to do sort of virtual interaction with people. But real world interaction is incredibly valuable and incredibly useful and vital to being happy. And the more you use social media, the less of the real world interaction you actually do with friends because you have this sense of I'm connected to people, I'm talking to people all the time. I just sent these sex messages in the last five minutes and I talked to my high school roommate and here's my old college roommate. But the benefits you get from that is so small compared to, compared to what you're losing. By doing less real conversation and analog interaction, you end up net negative. So the more you social media, the less you do actual real interaction and the worse and worse, ironically, your loneliness actually gets.
- [27:53]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So face to face instead of Facebook.
- [27:56]
Cal Newport
Yeah, face to face instead of Facebook. I mean, our brain, the degree to which our brain has evolved to essentially be a social processing engine is incredible. Right. You look at, at the research on how much of our brain power actually goes towards trying to understand and process complex social cues. It's completely impoverished when you take away this rich stream of input that you and I are seeing right now being in person and seeing facial expressions and movements and voce tonalities and you replace it with a one bit indicator, like.
- [28:25]
Dr. Mark Hyman
A one and a zero.
- [28:26]
Cal Newport
Yeah, yeah. It doesn't do it for our brain. Right. It's leaving it anxious and without much to do. And so that's sort of the first myth that somehow you're going to be happier in your social life using social media. The inverse seems to be true. If you don't use it now, you're going to have to do real social interactions to feed that urge.
- [28:45]
Dr. Mark Hyman
People have forgotten. I was amazed with these kids and millennials. They don't want to call each other on the phone. They are socially awkward and not able to actually have real connections and authentic relationships. But they're know on social media doing that. And it's, it's, it's, they've lost the skill of actually human connection interaction.
- [29:02]
Cal Newport
Yeah. And it's a vital skill. I mean, not just for sort of navigating the world, but just for, for mental health and happiness. So yeah, it is a big issue. So, you know, for people who are a little bit older, I'm old enough that, you know, I learned how to do all of that. I grew up before there were cell phones and social media. And so the big risk for someone my age might be that I get away from that too much. But if you're younger and it's all you've ever known, I think it's a big problem.
- [29:23]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Now the other part of it is not just that it doesn't make you happier, but you quote research that it actually makes you anxious and depressed and impairs your cognitive function. So not only is it not helpful, but it may be harmful. So you talk about the harm part.
- [29:38]
Cal Newport
Yeah, well, so the first indication I had that there's something screwy going on with this constant connectivity was probably four or five years ago. And so I was doing an event on a call campus, it was an elite college and I was talking to the head of the mental health services on the college and we had talked about some of these issues and she said, you know Cal, something I have noticed in my time here is that the issues we're dealing with with the students have changed dramatically. That what we used to deal with were sort of the standard mix of mental health issues you might expect in 18, 19, 20 year olds. There were sort of eating disorders and homesickness and some OCD and schizophrenia, some depression, sort of a mix, a variety. And she said it was like a switch flipped and it's all anxiety and anxiety related disorders and not just that, that's overtaken everything else, but the number of students coming in with these issues is well beyond what they ever saw before. And I said, okay, well what changed? And without a hesitation said, smartphones. It was that first class that came in that had had smartphones throughout their teenage years. They began to see it. So that caught my attention. Then we get, a few years later, you get Jean Tween. She's one of the, or twinge, I might be pronouncing her name wrong, but she wrote this, I think very important book last year called Igen and she's one of the top generational demographers, the world expert on understanding trends and how they differ between generations. And her whole book is basically making this argument that that's not a mirage. This entire generation, this entire Igen, the first generation to have smartphones starting from their teenage years is having off the charts mental health and anxiety related issues. And it's not. There was some pushback that, okay, well maybe this was reporting has changed. We're more aware and acute to sort of mental health issues now. That's not the issue because we have hospitalizations for suicide attempts among the same group has gone up right along with the mental health issue. So there's actually real issues that are happening. And she looked at every cause she could. She did not want the answer to be something so simple as it's smartphones and social media. It's really been the only thing that fits the, the only thing she's found that actually fits the timing and the Characteristics of the data. So I think there's actually, for young people, a mental health crisis caused by these phones.
- [31:55]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, no, I see that. I do see that in patients. I see that in my family members. And you know, the, the other part of it, in addition to sort of the anxiety and social isolation, which, you know, in somewhat are a little surprising, I think it makes you more connected, is, is the effect on your cognitive function. And you talk about the intensity of your focus and attention being related to the quality of your life, your productivity, your success in life. You know that you actually say you don't even work after 5 o' clock and you've written six books and what are you, 25 years old? How old are you?
- [32:27]
Cal Newport
36.
- [32:28]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay, well, that's pretty good. It took me till I was like 50 to write six books. But I think that that's a very interesting point because what happens to your ability to focus, pay attention, engage with your life, be present and alert to what's actually happening when you use social media?
- [32:47]
Cal Newport
Yeah, that's actually my entryway into this issue. So I wrote this book back in 2016 called Deep Work. And the premise of the book is that the ability to focus intensely without distraction, that's what I call deep work, is actually becoming more important in our economy at the same time that we're getting worse at it because of technology and that this created a mismatch and so that you would have this big advantage if you're one of the few, to really care and cultivate your ability to concentrate. And one of the things I discovered in researching this book is that, yes, these tools are having a permanent effect on people's ability to concentrate. It's not a matter of whether the tool is in front of you right now in the moment in which you're trying to concentrate. If you are just used to, in general, pulling out the phone or the tablet or opening up another tab, as soon as you get a little bit bored, give yourself a little bit of hit of stimuli. It permanently changes your brain, or at least for a long term, such that if I then take you away from all those stimuli and then put you in, you know, a Faraday cat, you could have no distractions. When you're on the plane and the WI fi is not working, you're going to have a hard time focusing and people think, oh, it's different. Yeah, at home I do this, I get bored, I look at the phone a lot. But in work I really concentrate. It has an effect. It's like an athlete saying, I Only smoke on the weekends, not when I'm training. Smoking is still going to affect you when you're on the playing field. You're hurting your physical health. And so these intense addictive forms of distraction have a long term effect on your cognitive health. And this has professional impacts. If you work in a knowledge sector job, it's going to make you worse at what you do.
- [34:16]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, that was interesting. I was sitting at a lecture the other night with a friend of mine and she was on her phone and she was tweeting and she was picturing and she was doing all kinds of stuff, Instagramming. And I said, give me your phone. And I grabbed the phone from her, I said, open your phone. And so I opened the Screen Time app and it shows not only the amount of screen time, which was a lot for her, but it showed the number of times you pick up your phone and it was like a thousand times in a day. And she said, what's yours? And I opened mine. It was like 60 or 70 times, which is still a lot. But I was like, wow, that's a lot. And I think people don't realize that it affects your ability to be engaged in any particular work for a long period of time. And that's concerning because the things that matter to us, the quality of work we do, determines our success in life in terms of our ability to actually be able to be engaged with what's happening around us. That's a big deficit.
- [35:09]
Cal Newport
Yeah. I think it's crazy. If we were professional athletes and we're eating junk food or if we were smoking, people say that's crazy. You make a living off of the physical health of your body. But it's the same thing if you're in elite level knowledge work. I mean, it's literally your brain and its ability to concentrate, its ability to take in and process information. Information and produce new information that has new value. That's at the core of probably a lot of your audience's living. Right. That's how they make a living. And to be on these phones all the time, that is the cognitive equivalent of junk food. And yet somehow we're not seeing it that way.
- [35:40]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So. So you're a scientist. What, what is the data that validates what you're saying? Because I can imagine people listening. Oh yeah, that's just kind of sure. Maybe I can't believe that I'm fine. You know, like, what is the actual hard data that supports this thesis that being on your phones all the time or being distracted by social media is actually Impairing your ability to focus.
- [36:01]
Cal Newport
Well, one of the more.
- [36:02]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Do deep work.
- [36:03]
Cal Newport
That's right. Well, I think one of the more alarming pieces of data that's out there now is, we call it, sometimes economists, the productivity paradox, which is, if you study non industrial productivity, so the economic metric of productivity, so the amount of actual output produced by per hour spent working it should have continued to increase over the past 10 years as we've had this revolution in not just our technology, but in connectivity and information. People are connected in places they never were before. They have essentially all the world's knowledge at their fingertips. They can move files and information from a device that fits in their hand with a supercomputer like power like this is amazing. And yet during this entire period, productivity has been stagnant. It's not going up. It should have been going up, but it's not. And there's a growing sense that one of the forces at play here is that, yes, these technology is giving us more options and power. And yet at the same time it's working against the way that our wetware works to actually fragment our intention in the way it does, makes our brain actually worse at concentrating, producing value. And so the, the downturn from that, combined with what should have been enhancing our productivity, which is the tools, is just flattening out. And so I think this has a real issue and I can only imagine that we're going to see if this is true, non industrial productivity actually start to go down as the younger generation that's more connected than anyone before starts to come into the workforce. So we have that piece of evidence then we have a lot of more close study, those individual type studies, actually trying to understand work, the late work by the late Cliff Nass of Stanford University. He did a lot of work actually in the lab, the psychology lab, with individuals working on what he called multitasking. But it's basically the same idea.
- [37:47]
Dr. Mark Hyman
There is no such thing, right?
- [37:48]
Cal Newport
There is no such thing. He actually helped spread that idea. But he was the one who actually had some pretty good research on chronic multitaskers. Think they're really good at concentrating, but they're much worse than people who don't. Another thread of research I'd like to point people towards is to work on attention residue. That's done by a professor named Sophie Leroy. And what she's finding is that when we think that we're not multitasking, what we're doing, when we've rejected multitasking, now we know we're not supposed to do It. So we try to do one thing at a time. We only have one window open, but every five or 10 minutes we do a quick check. So we don't have multiple windows open. We're not doing the late 90s style of multitasking around the first and doing email while writing. We're doing one thing, but every five or ten minutes it's check the phone or the tab. And what she's finding is that context switch and then back again, even if it's very brief, leaves what's called attention residue, which you can measure in the lab, reduces your cognitive capacity and takes a while to actually clear out. And you can measure this easily in the lab because you actually have people doing cognitively demanding puzzles. So they can see you start making more mistakes. And it takes 10, 20 minutes to.
- [38:56]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Actually get to reset. And then in that 20 minutes, you do another one.
- [38:59]
Cal Newport
You do another. And so what most knowledge workers are doing is they read Cliff Nass's work and they say, I don't multitask. I'm so advanced, I just single task. But because they're quick checking every five to 10 minutes, they put themselves in a state of persistently reduced cognitive capacity. It's like a reverse nootropic or something. A drug that makes you worse at what you do.
- [39:16]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow. Yeah, I know when I write my books, I literally have to turn off my phone, I turn off email, I often turn off wi fi, unless I'm not researching some articles. And it's. And I can literally sit and work for eight hours or read. And I just. Or I just print it out on paper and do it, you know, because it's so powerful and I get so much done. And yet, you know, when I'm constantly distracted between different things, I feel like I'm never really productive.
- [39:39]
Cal Newport
It's attention residue.
- [39:40]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [39:40]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I feel like I'm always sort of catching up and never complete it. And that's a, that's a very interesting thing because what you're saying is that by using our phones and technology that we do, we're actually decreasing our ability to be productive, to function, and there's no such thing as multitasking.
- [39:55]
Cal Newport
Yeah. And even if you think you're single tasking, if you're quick checking, it can be just as bad.
- [39:59]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Quick checking? Yeah. Well, that's sort of like multitasking now. You know, I, I feel like the thing that is fascinating about your work is that you also sort of talk about the positive benefits of not being on your social media or devices. And, and I'D like you to later clarify about the difference between being on devices versus social media. Because they're, they're not always the same. Right.
- [40:26]
Cal Newport
Yeah.
- [40:27]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So. So what are the benefits of, like, doing this? And by the way, there are so many movements out there around digital detox.
- [40:34]
Cal Newport
Yeah.
- [40:34]
Dr. Mark Hyman
There are camps. People go to the weekend and they put their phone away. You know that we, we in our center for Functional Medicine at Cleveland Clinic, we all put our phone phones and during meetings, we put them at the front of the table and no one can touch them. And we have much more productive, engaged meetings.
- [40:49]
Cal Newport
Yeah, well, so the interesting thing about digital detoxing, it puzzles me a little bit. It's really big right now. It's this notion that I'm going to, whatever, put my phone away for a weekend or Sundays. I step away from the phone and I don't use my phone or something like this. But then you go back and start using again normally. And so if you think about this, if you use this methodology for detoxing from anything else that we were doing, addicted to, it's not going to work that well. If I said I'm an alcoholic, so what I'm going to do, I have it all figured out. Don't worry, I'm going to go away and on Sunday, I'm not going to drink, but then get back to it again on Monday, is that really solving the problem? This is my issue with just the detox notion, or the digital Shabbat notion of you just take a little bit of time off the lifestyle. I often pitch and this is the new book is not Digital Detoxing but Digital Minimalism.
- [41:37]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. What is that?
- [41:38]
Cal Newport
It's a fun philosophy of technology use that says you should start with your values. What do I value? What's important to me in my life? Then for each of those, you ask, okay, what's the best way I can use technology to help these specific values? And then that's it. In terms of your engagement with technology, you can ignore the rest, miss out on the rest. As opposed to this maximalist approach of if I can think of anything interesting about using this app, I'll download it. If I can think of anything that might be cool about this gadget, I'm going to buy it. Minimalism says no, no. My life is about doing the things I really care about, really value. Often there's some way that you can use technology very intentionally and very selectively that's going to even boost and enhance those things you care about. Right. I mean, I'm a Computer scientist. I love technology, but you only use it in that way, and then you ignore the rest. And so instead of cluttering your life with every possible form of technology that begins to eat away at your attention and happiness, you have this very intentional use of a few things that do really well, and you're happy missing out on everything else. So, I mean, to get back to your original question, I've been studying these digital minimalists, and they're calm, they're happy. You can have a conversation with them for a long time and they won't once glance at a phone. They don't have this obsessive urge to document every nice moment. They can just actually be there. They're much more productive in work. They produce things of great value. They're respected by their friends, are involved in their community. I mean, you can go down the list. But when they free themselves from this constant sort of emotionally draining pull on their attention and get back to, here's what I care about, this is what I want to do, I'll use technology selectively to help that. And that's it. It's a much more present, mindful, and satisfying type of life.
- [43:18]
Dr. Mark Hyman
But that's not so easy because you also talk about the design of social media to be addictive. And the data scientists and behavioral experts, sort of attention experts who work for these social media companies design these programs to be addictive. So can you talk about what you mean by that? Is it truly addictive? Is it just a metaphor? And what's actually happening biologically? How do they come up with the ways to make these things so sticky?
- [43:47]
Cal Newport
Yeah, it was a depressing period when I dived into the reporting and research on how these companies make their products addicting. It's a little bit dark, actually. So the best way.
- [44:00]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Pull back the veil.
- [44:01]
Cal Newport
Yeah. So put the light on it. The best way to understand it is what psychologists think is that what they're trying to create is what they would probably call moderate behavioral addictions. So this is different than, say, a strong substance addiction. So, I mean, if I take away Facebook from a heavy Facebook user, they're not going to sneak out of the middle, middle of the night to go to an Internet cafe because they have to get a fix. On the other hand, they might. Yeah, they might. But if you're a heavy Facebook user and it's in your pocket and you can get at it anytime during the day, you're going to have a very hard time not using it a lot, because that's what a moderate behavioral addiction is going to drive you to do a lot of this absolutely, is engineered. What these attention engineers do is they try to hijack psychological voids, vulnerabilities. There's actually a famous lab at Stanford where they studied this. So this is something they're pretty good at. So, I mean, I can give you a couple examples. On Facebook, for example, when they first added notifications right on the mobile app, the designer said, clearly this should be within the Facebook palette, which is gray and blue. Right. So it's like sort of a very nice aesthetically pleasing thing. But the attention engineers came back and said, no, it needs to be alarm red, red, because we get a much higher click rate. If it's that color, it catches your attention. It's very hard to avoid the notion of this sort of endless scrolling. Right. This was, this was emphasized in part because it exploits psychological vulnerability. Sort of like a slot machine. Would that there might be something. One more scroll away, there might be something really interesting. These companies have invested millions of dollars to solve really, really hard computer science problems. Problems I know about as a computer scientist. You're like programming issues, programming issues that they really didn't need to solve. Like, for example, auto tagging people in pictures. This was a very hard problem in image recognition. But now if you post to Instagram, it can figure out, okay, this person, you know, that's Dr. Hyman. Let's send them a, you know, a note and say, do you want to tag this person? Right. This is very complicated technology. Why did they do it? Because if you say, yes, I want to tag them, that sends to you what they call social approval indicators. And the richer the stream of intermittently arriving social approval indicators that's arriving in your sort of virtual app inbox, the more irresistible it becomes to tap on. One of the things they optimize for is this is why the like button took off. Yeah, right. It was originally there for a much more mundane reason. But every time someone clicks, like social approval indicator. Every time someone tags you in a photo, social approval indicator. So now you have inside this app, every time you click on it, indicators that other human beings are thinking about you. Sometimes they're not there, sometimes they are. It's like, how does that affect the.
- [46:44]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Person hitting the like? It affects the person getting the like getting the like.
- [46:47]
Cal Newport
They want the richest possible stream of social approval indicators coming at you from your network. That makes it almost irresistible to click on that app to see what's going on. I mean, that's just pure psychological vulnerability. There's no reason for There to be like buttons on these things. Original design of social media was not so two way. You would post things that people could read. They added that because you get social approval and they get the tagging. So you could get social approval indicators. And that plays on this deep seated psychological vulnerability. Someone is thinking about me and I can get evidence of it if I touch this button right here. That's an incredibly powerful thing. And it really, really shot up their profitability and their average user minutes once the company started introducing these into their social media apps. I mean, the whole experience is engineered to keep you obsessively clicking on this thing and looking at that screen.
- [47:33]
Dr. Mark Hyman
What about the brain response to this? Because it's a dopamine response, which is the same hormone or I mean, the same neurotransmitter that is stimulating your brain when you have cocaine or heroin or alcohol or nicotine. Right. So. So how does that play a role in here?
- [47:48]
Cal Newport
Well, it's the same effect that the famous Zeiler experiments with the pigeons pecking on the lever. And if they intermittently got food, the way that messed with the dopamine system made them addictively tap in a way that if they knew they'd always get food, they wouldn't. And this is the effect that all of these intermittently arriving social approval indicators have. It's not food nuggets, it's likes and tags, but they're not always there. But sometimes they. They're there. And that messes with the dopamine system in a way we've known since those experiments in the 1970s.
- [48:18]
Dr. Mark Hyman
That can be B.F. skinner, right?
- [48:19]
Cal Newport
Yeah. It's impossible. It's impossible to ignore.
- [48:22]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And the best way to train your animal is intermittent reinforcement. Don't give them the treat every time. Make them guess and then keep them coming back.
- [48:28]
Cal Newport
Yeah. There's even rumors, I don't know if it's true, that Facebook for a while was actually purposely introducing randomized delays into giving some of this feedback back just to make sure that it was a little bit more intermittent. I don't know if that's true, but I wouldn't put it past them, given what I've learned.
- [48:41]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So then there's good science about how they're doing this and the technology that they're using. And it is addictive.
- [48:47]
Cal Newport
Yes. It's meant to be. Yeah.
- [48:49]
Unknown
I think it's important to think about the harms of social media, not in terms of just one specific thing. You know, these are very complex systems. Humans are very complex. Right. The human body, the Human mind is very complex. So if we approach it as if there's just one silver bullet, we're not going to get anywhere. Right. If it's just fixing advertising, I don't think that's actually going to solve the problem necessarily. So I think it's more important to think about it like you would maybe like a human body and an illness. Right. You're not going to solve your, you know, your, your athlete's foot with the same thing that will solve your broken arm. Right. So it's, I think there's, there's, there's, there's this, I think, some good analogies from, from the world of medicine in terms of thinking about how social media influences us and how we can intervene and make it better. So we just talk about the problem for a second, which I think is important to just be clear about. One of the primary problems, social media, in terms of mental health and anxiety, is that it's becoming our primary source of news and information for a lot of people. It's becoming. Even if you still go to the New York Times or you go to Fox News or wherever you get your news from, social media actually is a certain type of filter on the news. And more than half of American adults get news from social media today. And social media posts tend to be negatively valence when it comes to news. We actually tend to respond more immediately to news that is negatively, emotionally valenced. So stuff that is outrageous, missing context, anger inducing, disgusting, we tend to respond to that most, most quickly and immediately. And then that's a really good signal for algorithms to track, right? And if you build a basic engagement algorithm that's trying to track what people are interested in, this actually goes back to traditional news. If it bleeds, it leads. Algorithms have figured that out, right? If it gets you stuck on the item, you are going to keep responding to it.
- [50:54]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Is that why I get so many guerrilla videos?
- [50:58]
Unknown
Maybe, Perhaps.
- [50:59]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I love it, actually.
- [51:00]
Unknown
Totally, totally. You know, I want to calibrate that like, you know, we've been with this, with these tools for a little bit now, long enough I think, in some ways to start to see new versions of slightly more kind of healthy algorithmic curation that have begun to be, that have tried to keep you happy and not keep you depressed and sad and doom scrolling, right. But we have a word for it, doom scrolling, right? Like, it's like everyone knows what that is. Everyone has done it at this point in time. It's a strange new pathology that has no clinical reflection yet, but it's Something that we absolutely feel. And I think that when we are exposed to too many of these negative stories, too many of these negatively valenced posts, it does create a sense of learned helplessness, which is when we feel a stressful situation consistently and repeatedly, we basically start to believe that we can't control the situation and we can't actually respond and we can't do anything to solve the world's problems. And that's really problematic. Right. That's a problem in itself. We need to feel like we can actually tackle the problems that we're facing. And if social media has given us this huge new body of available problems and issues, if we are feeling helpless to solve those issues, then that's a recipe for extreme depression. It's a recipe for disaster in terms of our mental health. And that's really important.
- [52:36]
Dr. Mark Hyman
When we think about what's the genies out of the bottle and our identities, our beliefs are. I can't think of any better analogy than the Matrix. I feel like we're all plugged in the Matrix and need to freaking unplug so we can actually have a sense of what's true and real and, and we don't even know where to go to find out what the truth is anymore. It's a little bit disorienting for people. It's disorienting for me. And I, I feel like I'm fairly well educated, fairly well read.
- [53:08]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [53:08]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, I, I pay attention, I travel over the world, I meet all sorts of people, I listen to different perspectives, and it's like, you know, what actually is true and, and, and what is, what is actually a person to do as they're trying to navigate their life and figure out, you know, how to make sense of the world. And, and in a way, social media has, has helped us make nonsense of the world. And, and so how do we start with sense making again? How do we, how do we deal with these digital technologies that we have now? Is there a way to sort of put the genie back in the bottle? And, and I want to eventually get to artificial intelligence where the genie is not quite fully out of the bottle yet. And what do we got to do?
- [53:53]
Unknown
Scary genie, it's a little pinky out of the bottle right now. Yeah. So I think focusing on the issue of sense making is really important. So in studying this book, I kept on. So this book is actually a history book. Once you get through the first half of it, it goes straight back to every previous media disruption in history that I go back as far as the printing press, trying to understand basically what happens when you increase people's ability to see knowledge, share knowledge, and be emotionally excited by knowledge. And every single major media technology has had a tremendous influence on our species. So, yeah, starting about halfway through the book, it goes back to Martin Luther and the printing press and what happened when we were introduced to the printing press. And it turns out the printing press was arguably the most violent invention introduced to continental Europe up until that point in history. Right. It caused huge schisms within the existing power hierarchies. It totally upset society, and it caused about 100 years of civil wars.
- [55:07]
Dr. Mark Hyman
The printing press.
- [55:08]
Unknown
The printing press, literally those books, right. And you wouldn't at the end of that point have said, no, we don't want the printing press, we don't want all these books. We want people to go back the old ways. But there was this deep, deep dark period in which people were deeply confused. You know, in that era, a tolerance, like, tolerance, the idea of tolerance was actually a sin. Like it was actually a sin that. So someone was of a different political persuasion or religious persuasion. It was kind of your job to go up to them and like confront them about it and. Or be violent with them about it. Right. So you think about how disruptive that was to go from one way of being to another way of being in the world. And so we don't tend to think about information technology as being such a disruptive and violent thing, but it absolutely can be. And the reason is because it confuses us. It confuses us. It gives us access to huge new models of kind of moral reasoning about the world. And it also exposes us to a tremendous number of possible outrages. And many of those outrages are real, many of those outrages are not real. And to figure out the differences between what is worthy of our attention is really part of the problem that we're facing right now. So when we talk and just kind of like lean towards some optimism towards solutions here. Coming back to the beginning of our conversation, it's, you know, I can't emphasize enough how problematic mis and disinformation is. And we have, you know, as Americans, I think we have a healthy skepticism of authorities. We have this kind of anti authoritarian disposition where it's like, don't trust the government, don't trust the experts. We can figure it out on our own. That's a very American disposition. But there is a real difference between authoritarian speech and mediated speech, which is speech and information that comes from media entities that are built to help try to Parse truth and falsehoods. And they don't always get it right. They're not always going to, you know, they're not always going to give you the exact right, the exact right result, the exact right truthful item. But, but it's going to be oftentimes much better than your average person trying to figure it out by doing their own research online. And so that's, that's, you know, we do need to find these proxies, these middle layers of proxies. And you can, you know, it's, it's. We're actually lucky insofar as good information has a fingerprint. And what I mean by that, by good information, I'm not just saying good information. I'm saying that good information, accurate information, has a fingerprint. It tends to be well cited. It tends to go through a few of these layers of refutation and peer review and people that are trying to figure out whether or not it's accurate. And we can look at that in how the information travels. If it's one person's idea that just comes to you directly, it's less likely to be true than one person's idea that has gone through three or four cycles of other people calling bullshit on that idea, trying to actually figure out if it's true or not. Because we're much better at identifying the failures of other people's logic and the failures of other people's assertions than we are our own. And that's really the point of free speech in the first place, is so that we can share and we can criticize each other openly and improve the available knowledge for everyone.
- [58:36]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, I mean, it's increasingly disturbing to hear, you know, censorship happening and yeah, you know, free, you know, range of opinion not being heard and, you know, debate being shunned. And I think, wow, like, what kind of a society we're in where we're burning books. You know, I just watched the Ken Burns documentary, Us and the Holocaust, and it was just, you know, I thought, you know, gee, you know, we had this sort of, this sort of relatively new rise of division in society, but it would always existed. It's always sort of been a threat in America. Right. The north and the south, the slave owners and the, not the, yeah, you know, the, the sort of isolationists and, you know, the globalists in America. And you know, I think it's, you know, we're sort of, I, I think always prone to this. But, you know, how do we, how do we find the, you know, as sort of Abraham Lincoln Talked about how do we find the search for our better angels? You know, how do we get to our better angels who are going to inspire us instead of take us down the path of the worst aspects of humanity? You know, there's been war and violence and rape and destruction for millennia. But, you know, I feel like human consciousness, it seems like it's slowly getting better, but it's in again. These, these forces that are at play now in technology are seemingly taking us really out of any age of enlightenment that we were in for any period of time.
- [59:55]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [59:55]
Dr. Mark Hyman
How do we find our way back from that?
- [59:57]
Unknown
Yeah. So I think that's really, it's really important to recognize that. And this is why I kind of come back to the misinformation point a lot is, is because the, the feel, the feeling right now is one of, of deeply. There's threats ever everywhere, right? It feels that we feel deeply threatened by the world, by. By our political enemies, our ideological enemies, the enemies to the identities and the people that we hold dear. That is something that social media does very well, is serve us threats more than it would, more than traditional media would. Right. Social media would focus on a single threat at a time. And now social media has exposed us to basically infinite threats always, right. It's like if you're worried about something, you can find an anecdote that represents that deepest fear. And social media is very, very good at serving us up those algorithms that prioritize certain content over other content. And our own biases play together to actually make us see these threats more apparently than otherwise. And something strange happens when we are exposed to a lot of threats, right. We actually seek. There's this basically this kind of tribal switch that happens in our brains in which we start to affiliate ourselves more strongly with in group and out group behavior. So we look for safety in identities that feel like they are more like us, right. And we look to denigrate the out groups that are threatening, right? And if you're curious about why there's so many hashtag identity, this hashtag identity that on social media, that is actually one of the reasons why, is because everyone feels a little bit threatened on social media and they feel like, I need to declare my allegiance, I need to protect the things that I hold dear in this space. I think it really does come down to this fundamental idea of threat, that if we're exposed to too many threats, then it actually causes us. It causes these basic tribal emotions to increase dramatically. And there's some decent research showing that this Jay Van Bavel at nyu. He has a great book called the Power of Us, which I'd recommend on this topic as well, which, which shows how much identity shapes our behavior, particularly online. It really does, it does influence our, how, how we see others. It's like a lens that we, we suddenly are putting over our eyes. And like, I see you and you are not, you know, you're not, you're not this, you're not just a human, you are that. You are now a Republican, you are now a Democrat. You are now. And these identities become far more instantaneously salient to us. Us, because we're looking at everything through the lens of social media and these. And unfortunately, it doesn't just stay on social media. That's, I think, one of the biggest problems here. It's like these narratives stick with us. They follow us to our dinner tables, to our congregations. They follow us everywhere we go. And if the threat is pernicious enough, then, if it's scary enough, then it will keep running. A little process in the back of your head and it will kind of infect most of your interactions.
- [63:03]
Dr. Mark Hyman
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