The Chasing Life was hosted by Dr. Gupta
What Can Parents Do? Ask Dr. Gupta, MD: Chasing Life is Medicine for Children, Parents and Teens – A Primer for Pediatrics and Parents
I have questions, many, many questions. How much time is spent on a screen? What are the warning signs? Things are not going well. What can you do about it? He has a lot of tips for children and parents to help them navigate the new world. I’m Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent. And this is Chasing Life.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
A typical story about a college student cramming all nighters and hanging out with friends. Part 1: I’m glad to tell you, but I know there is no end point
I think that it started to wear on me physically first. I was scrolling for hours, and I wasn’t going to sleep. It was taking hours out of my day.
It will sound like a typical story when I tell it to you. It’s about a college student named Jerome Yankey. He was pulling a lot of all nighters, but he wasn’t cramming for exams. He wasn’t hanging out with friends.
It was hard to stop. It was as hard to say, okay, I’ve seen enough because there isn’t enough on TikTok. There’s no winning on TikTok. There is no end point. You just keep going.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
How Jerome became a Youtuber and the “Tikik Tok” became an Internet Star, and how his work ethic inspired me to become more creative
If I had more time to eat, sleep, and work, then I would be able to average between 5 to 6 hours a day.
It is the journey of saying “Hello, this is my TikTok account.” I have zero followers. The only people I know on here are my friends, and I’m going to post and someone might see it because there is a chance. Because that’s how the TikTok algorithm works.
The story is about a young man’s dreams of becoming an internet star and the hard work he devoted to it. The story has a typical end, which is not a happy one. As with most people, Jerome’s videos never really took off, and that was frustrating. All that scrolling was putting a downward spiral in motion.
I was just scrolling through everything and just keeping on with it. That’s when I began to become less creative and more Cynic, you know? All I would be doing is just reviewing content. I would see it I would be very amused, because I could be funnier. Or, Oh, they’re not even that good.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
What Happened to Jerome When he Came Down the Rabbit Hole, and How I Helped His Daughter to Go To College
Something deep inside of him stirred, and that’s when he said it. Maybe it was an urge to look up from his phone and view the world around him. It was like emerging from a fog.
It was only when I took a break from the app that I realized I wasn’t unattractive, unsuccessful, or unpopular. It was just the fact that I was comparing myself to the super ideals of every form.
That. That is the thing that stuck out to me most about the story. How innocently it all started. I can’t help but think about what I can do to stop my daughters from going to that same place as a dad. Look, I see how much they enjoy the app. I can see the appeal. Heck, we’ve even made videos together. There’s what I worry about. As much as I work hard to protect them, in their real world, I do worry about their digital world and what might happen to my girls when they don’t have as many rules or supervision. My oldest, Sage, is about to head to college, which means soon she will be the same age Jerome was when this all happened to him. It is hard to believe, but could the same thing happen to her? Thankfully, Jerome managed to figure it out on his own. I know people can’t do that. Sometimes it gets so bad people need to get medical help.
It’s there to help children and families who have gone down the rabbit hole with gaming, social media, and what we call information bingeing.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
The First Day of Virtual Media Use Lockdown: How Dr. Rich Becomes a Mediatrician in Boston Children’s Hospital
We have to figure it out as we go along in a brave new world. And it’s not even generational anymore. I worry about my 14 year old sibling because this environment is morphing and evolving so quickly, even though I have 17 year old patients who say, you know, I’m cool.
We went to virtual visits prior to the lock down. I had about a 30% no show rate on first visits for kids who are struggling with their interactive media use because the parents would wuss out and wait until the night before or the morning of and saying, we’re going to take you to a doctor, is going to take your video games away. The kids would say, “No effin way, I’m out of here.” As soon as we went virtual, our no show rate dropped to zero because they’re comfortable in this environment.
Dr. Rich is a self-described mediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital. A person who resembles a mediatrician. That’s a fun way of saying that he treats young patients with what he calls problematic media use and what is problematic. These kids lives are disrupted when they spend a lot of time online. When it comes to treating patients for problematic media use, it is not lost on him that he uses a screen. This story has many twists and turns. Before Dr. Rich got into medicine, he worked in the media.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
What is the Pain Point of Parents? “I Know You are My Baby, But I Know You Aren’t” [Episodes on Screen Media]
I spent my wicked youth in the film industry. I love Screen Media, but I also respect it. And I think that in any great love affair, there’s a deep respect as well.
When a parent brings their child to see you, they are doing it because they’re worried, right? If a parent is taking their child to see the doctor and then leaving alone for something similar, it’s because they are worried. You know, they’ve been having pain, they’ve been unable to keep food down, whatever it may be. They are coming into you with a concern. What is the concern? Exactly. I am concerned about my child spending too much time on a screen. It’s what, what?
The parents see a young person withdrawing from many aspects of her or his life. You know, they are not getting up for school. Sometimes they’re staying up all night gaming or on social media or whatever. So they see the young person withdrawing actually from them most acutely. The child is in their room. The kid, you know, is on screen. You can spend time with the family instead of having meals together. So I think that’s the pain point for parents.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
What Is It Like to Be Too Much in the World For a Patient or Family? A Punishment Based on Addiction as a Penalty
What does it mean to be too much in this world for a patient or family? And we have to define within normal limits in medicine. That’s how you get lab results within normal limits. What is the limit here?
When their day-to-day functions are impaired, that’s the problem. They are not getting enough sleep. They are overeating. They aren’t in class or falling asleep. They are withdrawing from their friends. And actually, one of the things I do with these young people in the first visit, if I can, if they will let me through the chink in the armor is try to identify their pain points, the things that they wish were going better, whether it be school or. I wish I had more friends, etc. rather than having some ideal that sort of says over x number of hours is problematic, is impairing your life. I want to know when they wake up and when they go to sleep. How are you feeling? I think that’s what it has been about. How are you doing? Do you get grades that reflect your capabilities in school? And almost invariably they’ll say no. We’ll look at why that might be.
Yes, it would be TV watching or things like eating disorders, substance use disorders of various kinds. And what it has in common with those is that these are behaviors that are trying to make them feel better or feel more in control of things. I do not see social media and the Internet as a cause of anxiety or depression because they are framed as such, and that may not have actually happened at this stage of life. What the interactive media environment does for them is it provides them a place where those anxieties, depression, etc. can kind of manifest themselves even more, even if they were not noticed otherwise.
If you were seeing your patients in a world with less screen time or social media, you would want one of them. 15 years ago. Did you know what, 20 years ago, whatever it may be. Would that child still be seeing you? But instead of social media, it would be ex, you know, TV watching or, you know, some other sort of hyper binge activity.
And that’s why I sort of move away from addiction as a model, because we as a society use the term addiction as pejorative. We view addiction as a punishment, just like weak people with weak character, and we approach it the same way. These kids have short term issues withdrawing from these behaviors. It is not the behavior that the young person is doing that makes them feel better, but the behavior that the young person is seeking out so that they can feel better, or at least something that helps them who have been in school all day and are tired. Including their social interactions where they can’t keep on top of a conversation. They come home and they sit down in front of a screen and play a first person shooter. And not only are they in control of that universe, but in many ways they are better than so-called neurotypical kids at a game that actually reinforces and rewards distractibility, hyper vigilance, and all the aspects of ADHD that are problematic in a classroom setting.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
Is it Really Necessary to Give Up? How Do We Teach Children to Drive a Car? A Question from Dr. Rich
That’s fascinating. That’s a really great idea of how you might feel when you have a day like that, where you feel behind all day. You can regain some sense of control when you come home. I mean, that sounds like it’s familiar to me. Frankly, it sounds familiar in terms of what I may see with my kids, but even myself to some extent, you know, like I will find myself playing some silly game on planes, you know, and things because I’m. I want to regain a sense of control. Maybe I need some wins. I need a few wins because I’ve had a bunch of losses today, but I can beat this computer at this.
It stuck to me because of the last point from Dr. Rich. When you treat someone who’s addicted to something like alcohol or cigarets, what you’re asking really is for people to give those things up. Abstinence, that makes sense. That’s simply not realistic with technology, let’s face it. Dr. Rich’s approach is to respect it and learn to live with it. I am aware of that being a big shift from the doom and gloom warnings. We often hear that social media is harming us like a bad drug and that it. Needs to be cut out of our lives.
I think that if we could think about the way we think about our child’s use of a mobile device in the way we think about driving a car, then we would be able to treat it like the power tool it is. Right? A car is something kids want to get. But that being said, I don’t think we would teach our child to drive either, because everyone else is doing it regardless of what their age is or in a way that is sort of a have at it, you know. But we will hand a four year old who’s screaming an iPad and say, you know, go play Angry Birds or something like that as a tool to calm them down without thinking about the implications. I think we need to teach these kids how to use tools in a way that is respectful and safe, so we don’t have to say don’t hit that tree if you want to drive. We teach them to drive a car and in the process they learn to be safe. I think we need to approach it with a sense of mastery, not out of fear, but because of the power it has.
Thinking about it as a power tool, more like an automobile maybe, you know, sort of framing. My children are starting to drive so I think it’s interesting. I think about that at least once a day. Like if you said, what is my biggest concern about screens with my teenagers? When they’re behind the wheel of a car far away, my biggest concern is they use it, because it can be catastrophic in a very short time. Do I worry about how much they’re using it overall? Sure. I am more concerned about what they are using it for when they use it.
What really matters here is content that we are both consuming and creating in this space and the context in which we are using it. So something that would be perfectly fine, you know, in the middle of the day between things you don’t want your kid doing at three in the morning, in in bed at night interrupting their sleep, or you don’t want them sitting at the dinner table, you know, online, etc.. There should be more focus on the content. And is this healthy content? This content is helpful or not? What is the context of what they are doing? And I think the one place that screen time comes in is really what is this displacing that I could be doing? Yeah. Could I be having a conversation at the kitchen table with mom or dad? Is it possible that I could play with my friends? The online space can get in the way of the rich and diverse experiences that are so helpful to growing up.
Chasing Life: Dr. Rich’s Advice for Changing Your Family’s Technology Relationship with Technology (with an appendix by David D. Rich)
And I’m going to get his advice for improving my own family’s relationship with technology. Stay up to date. Now back to Chasing Life. Before we hear more from Dr. Rich, I want to first introduce you to one of his patients.
Allison visited Dr. Rich for the first time as a preventive measure. There wasn’t yet a problem, but her mom, Amy, says that she was struggling to raise Allison and her siblings in a world that was so different from the one that she grew up in.
The TV broke in the back of my dad’s closet and was fixed by him, after I had my tonsils out. We didn’t have a TV until I was 16. It was definitely baptism by fire when you have screens all around, raising kids.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
“Drink or Die”: A Wellness Check For Smartphone Usage (Aug. 2005), 6:30-8:00 AM ET/PM/PM
I have implemented downtime where I don’t have my phone on until after 715 so that I can sleep, and at night I can’t use it because it’s too dark. But I also made app limits so I can only spend a certain amount of time on YouTube. I can only spend a certain amount of time doing games. I only have a limited amount of time to spend on other apps. That means I don’t spend most of my time scrolling.
It’s pretty impressive. And again, keep in mind, she’s only 13. I can tell you that I’m very close to your parents. It is sometimes thought of going to the doctor for a checkup to prevent future health problems. That is what your parents did for you here as well. And for all your listeners. The conversation with Dr. Rich is supposed to help you. Think of it as a wellness check for smartphone usage.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
How do you gain the trust of your patients? An invitation to discuss how to get the most trust from the doctors you see in your clinic (Extended Abstract)
How do you gain the trust of the patients you treat? I’m not saying that they are looking at you saying that this guy is old. We are both the same age. I’m not going to elaborate. How can they comprehend my world? How do you gain that trust?
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
I’m a dad or a doctor: What does it take to improve the quality of life in the digital age? What do you think about Grand Theft Auto?
I ask them what games they play. I show them that I am knowledgeable about it and that I don’t think it is a bad place. I’m approaching it as the world in which they live. And I think that’s a mistake that a lot of parents make, which is they’re sort of dealing with it as something else. They’re standing at the top of the basement stairs saying, turn off Grand Theft Auto. I hate that. The parents are encouraged to sit down next to their child and play Grand Theft Auto with them, because there are some really interesting things that happen then. Number one is, instead of saying, I hate that, get rid of it, it’s bad for you, you’re saying, I love you, I care about you. I want to understand what engages you. I want to understand what you’re doing here. And then when you finally figure out the 47 different moves with your thumbs it takes to steal a car, and you ask your child, okay, I finally figured out how to steal cars. Let’s talk about why we might want to do that and rehearse it over and over and over again. Right. You’re coming from a very different place. You are that child’s student and you are learning that from them. You’re making the power differential meaningful to the kid by changing it. I care about you, and you are not wagging your finger at them so much as you are saying to allow them to move on. That isn’t a punishment but is the next step.
If you distill it all down, then is there a best way, not a right way, but is there a best way to raise children in an increasingly digital world? What are the other kinds of tips that you give?
At the end of the day, my biggest question was not about the data, but about how to improve the quality of life. When he looks at where this is headed I wanted to know if he was a dad or a doctor. Does he feel hopeful?
I’m hopeful. I will acknowledge the fact that as a doctor that is kind of an occupational hazard. I hear from the kids that I am hopeful. And so I think that we will get better. We will also encounter problems we don’t even anticipate yet. So I think that, yes, things are going to get better. And yes, there will be some potholes in the road. The real question is: will we be able to spot those holes and steer around them? Or are we going to hit them and have to resolve them as problems? Either way, I am sure that we can do this. We have to take a yes we can attitude toward this and be prepared for problems to occur and solve them without guilt.
The season has been a lot heavy so far. It’s been very personal. I’ve had conversations with my three teenage daughters that have been so illuminating and so wonderful and at times frightening, to be honest. They live another life, their digital life, which I simply don’t know as much about. And I think we often fear what we don’t understand imagining and anticipating all the potential dangers of social media and screen time. But, you know, I realize something else as well, something that frankly surprised me a bit. And that is despite the worry and the concern, I do realize that our phones and the Internet, it can be a sincere source of joy and connection and learning for so many people. And that’s part of the reason I was so excited to talk to Hank. He’s someone that my daughters look up to.
Get in the habit of taking a break, so that you can both better understand the effect that your relationship with technology is having on you, and then also appreciate its benefits more.
I think I can quit both of those things. Snapchat would be a little bit harder to give up because that’s my probably my main source of communication.
The Adventures of Chasing Life with CNN Audio: A Conversation with Sanjay Gupta, Hank Green, and the State of the Internet
Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Grace Walker, Xenia Lopez, Eryn Mathewson, and David Rind are involved in the production of the show. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Tommy Bazarian is our engineer. Dan Dzula is a technical director. The executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig. A special thank you to Ben Tinker, the CNN Health team and their cosmetologist,Katie Hinman.
This season, we’ve been talking about the potential dangers of social media and the amount of time we spend online. But what about the positive, educational sides of the internet? On this episode, Dr. Sanjay Gupta talks to one of the YouTube’s earliest content creators, Hank Green . Sanjay and Hank discuss the state of the internet today, the responsibility of having a platform, and how to deal with harsh online comments. Is the future of the internet utopian? Dystopian? Or maybe both?
I’m on the Internet to help people learn and get curious and do well in school and understand more of the knowable things of their universe and know more about the unknowable things. And that that’s beautiful and it’s fun. I get a lot of joy from that.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
Hank Green: From YouTube to the Internet and the Digital World. Episodes: A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor and An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
Hank Green. He’s an author, a science communicator, and a vlogger. He started on the video sharing site in 2007. Think about that. Content creator was not even a thing back then. So he has seen the digital evolution play out in real time.
You know, I remember sort of it kind of happened for me back in like 2012, 2013 when the stuff that I started to see getting made on YouTube was a lot of sort of cruel pranks or like manipulative guys trying to get-
Hank began posting videos at a time when stars were pretty much a thing. He’s got a pretty unique perspective as a person who hit the big time with the Internet and gained a following that young people aspire to, because of this. Hank decided to write about his online experiences after spending a lot of time online. Sort of. Hank wrote two books about the internet and the digital world. They are named A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor and An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. I love the titles of both of them. Hank says he was drawing inspiration from his life even if the books are fiction.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
Chasing Life: What Happens When You’re Out Of The Screen? An Interview With Hank Green, CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent
Is my son worse off because his dad is an Internet guy and he’s going to be on the Internet the whole time. All the time and like. It is impossible for me to be like that you can’t use social media. He’s going to ask you what to do.
So far in the season, I’ve been asking professors and doctors and experts some pretty tough questions about screen time and social media. But now I wanted to hear from someone who makes the content that we see when we are scrolling.
I think now we’re all kind of comfortable with the idea that the Internet is good and bad and that it’s a tool and you can build a house with a hammer or you can, you know, hit somebody in the head with it.
Today, my conversation with Hank Green, a content creator and a fellow dad, about what life is like on the other side of the screen. I’m Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent. This is what it is called, Chasing Life.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
Cross-Generational Dialogues – It’s Hard to Talk to Your Kids on Social Media, But I Know It Isn’t
I do. And I think that the the idea of teaching people science in particular, just as a scientist myself, I think is super important. I have three teenagers with videos that they have shown in their classrooms. So when I told them that I was interviewing you, they I think they also knew you. So you’re cross-generational, which is pretty cool.
Yeah. And I have to say, these are tough conversations. I think as parents, I’ve gone through this, Hank and I have 17, 15 and 13. And my 17 year old the other day said to me, I probably wouldn’t let my kids be on social media as early as I was. I was a good parent, so it is a little bit of a punch in the gut to hear.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
What do we really do? How to find the balance in what we do and how we do it, and how to respond when we don’t
She’s aware of what she’s done to herself and she’s aware of what it’s done for her. I think she made me a little bit optimistic by the fact that she would dial back some of the calls. I feel a lot of times that way. This is a common occurrence in medicine and it is assumed the worst case scenario. We have to assume the worst, hope for the best, but assume the worst. Everything that we do in terms of our how we respond is the worst case scenario. But that isn’t the case for most people. So how to find the balance there? And I don’t know the answer, and I don’t know that you know the answer, but I’m just curious how you think about it.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
Where is all that junk food versus real food? When is everything that you see on social media? A conversation with my daughter Soleil
The metaphor of junk food versus real food has been conjured up. I think that really resonates with me. There is content like Hank’s, which is educational and scientific, but there is a lot of junk, it’s an interesting way of framing this. And therein lies the problem. I was having a conversation about this with my youngest daughter, Soleil, and she had shown me this meme on social media. And it was funny. We laughed, but it also wasn’t true. And I asked her, I said, Soleil, you know, this isn’t true, right? She chuckled and showed me her phone again. Yeah, it’s on Instagram. And I said, Right, right. It’s not true. Something that she told me next stopped me in my tracks. I don’t think that anything that I see online is true, Dad, that’s what she said. Think about that. Much of what she receives is garbage. So in essence, as a result, it all becomes garbage. It all starts to be a bit suspicious. It’s like you’re in a really scary place where nothing, nothing at all can be trusted and it’s all lumped together. Social media in a lot of the Internet is just a playground for them not to be taken seriously. And that drags everyone down. It drags everything down. For someone like Hank, who makes good, credible, fact checked, vetting content, it doesn’t really matter.
We’re talking about like sense making at this point. Like there’s always been structures of credibility. If you go back to the beginning of newspapers, everyone knew that there was a communist newspaper and a Republican newspaper, as well as business news, but now we have that to some extent. It was clear that when I was growing up in the 90s. Now it’s not clear. And so one thing that I try to do very hard is to get stuff right with the content that I’m making and when I get stuff wrong, talk about the fact that I got it wrong and why. It’s almost too much for people to know that everyone fallsible, but also that you can sort of walk down a path that leads to your wrong decision. But I worry about it being so person focused because a person almost is like has to be less credible than a really good organization because a person can only do so much and a person you can’t scale them the same way You can’t build the same way with a strong news organization. And so if we end up in a situation where we only believe individuals, I think that’s a worse world.
This is obviously something that you’re quite good at. I am not saying this just to flatter you, but a lot of the people that pay attention to you and see your work in schools are people that want to educate their kids in a good way. That is one thing that you said, and how do you confess when you’ve got something wrong? How much time do you devote to the idea of trusting yourself with your own content? You want to get it accurate, but just the idea of trust, everything from word choice to, I don’t know your background to your your presentation, how much do you think about that in this digital world?
I mean, I think about I think about it all the time. It’s one of the things I worry about it and on a lot for a lot of different good reasons. I worry about it myself. If I didn’t live up to what I’ve been saying about myself in public, a lot of people would be devastated. The thing I like to say about making content on the Internet is that, like all of me that you see is me. You don’t see everything of me. And I worry a lot about, you know, I’ve seen people both in just mistakes and in like really intentional ways to do things that have really destroyed a lot of their credibility. And they’re not just destroying their own thing, they’re destroying something else that is bigger and it’s inside of other people. That’s the one that I want to be very careful with.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
How do I get into a fight now? The real struggle that I had to go through with my mistakes, and what I’ve learned from it
It takes a toll on a professional like Hank when he interacts more online than I do. When we come back, avoiding that urge to get into it for your own good.
I’ve learned over the years that if you want to argue with a professional arguer you have to become a professional arguer. I don’t do that for a living.
I was working on it at the time. It’s a strange job, not a lot of people have done it. When I uploaded my first video, I was 27. So I was married an adult. I had a stable set of situations. It is not the truth for most people. We were like 18 to 19 years old in that era, and like most of my colleagues we were also younger than that. And it was a lot easier for them to make worse decisions. And because, you know, for all the reasons and and I kind of wanted to walk through like just sort of let let a character make some mistakes for me that so that I wouldn’t make. I also think that the internet is going to be in the future and how good it is at turning things into a fight, as well as explore how I see it now.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
How much time do you spend online? A question for anybody who spends time online to make something and make a living on Twitter, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
How much time do you spend online? You’re spending lots of time online to make something. But just as a user of these various platforms, how would you characterize your use.
I could probably make the case just to justify, the parts where it wouldn’t be easy to refer to it as work. It could take the form of 2 to 3 hours per day. What is online, that’s weird? Everything is online to some extent. And so like Netflix is online that I’m not counting that. But in terms of like using Twitter and TikTok and YouTube. Consuming content, doing social media, social stuff, it’s hours per day, probably two or 3 hours per day.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
What do they tell us about science and the way that they’re bringing it to you? How does it rile you up, and what are they saying?
I feel like it’s a thing that you have to get good at. When I have been using it like it is, there are times when it has been destructive for me. I’m almost trying to find some reason to be upset. And I’m. I’m like, I’ve, I’ve stumbled across a piece of the Internet or like I sort of set of the content creators who are saying things specifically what bugs me probably the most of all things is when they’re taking some like nugget of scientific truth and then usually biological and then applying that to a social system or to politics in a way that is really appealing. But really it’s sort of backtracking to the perspective that they wanted to have. So just like grabbing some sciencey thing and telling a, like doing unscientific things with it where I’m like, I want to- just, I’m so mad. You can’t speak and not say anything. Do you know? You can say something, but I can be angry that the world isn’t how I want it to be. And, and my wife kind of can quickly identify when I’m in that space. There is something you’re angry about that doesn’t affect what you do. It’s like you can’t fix everything in the present. It’s hard to be a good father and partner and a good leader when you focus on what you do rather than what you actually like. If I’m sort of caught up in some thing that, you know, I think that the Internet is somewhat designed to to catch us in conflict because that is really good at keeping us on the platforms, which is ultimately what the platforms are designed to do and what their algorithms are designed to do.
Your wife sounds very smart. Obviously. I am curious about these videos and the way that theyrile you up. How does it get to you? Is it is it part of your feed? Is it being fed to you by one of these algorithms you’re describing?
Part of my like, the fun part of my job is that people will ask me questions. And so one that I saw just this week, it came to me because several people on TikTok had seen this video, which got millions of viewers, and it was talking about some things in a scientific frame. And a bunch of people had tagged me and they said, Hank Green, is this true? And I have to tell you that it was not. Like you’re just trying to take something that sounds, sciencey to lend credibility to your argument. I get into that as well. I like that it makes my blood pressure go up. Over time, I’ve been better at realizing that. One of the things. I found out that if you want to argue with a professional they need to become a professional arguer. I don’t do that for a living. I don’t argue with people for a living. I don’t use the Internet to shout at people. I’m on the Internet to help people learn, get curious, and find out more about the universe and it’s mysteries. And that that’s beautiful and it’s fun. And like, I get so much joy from that. I think it does a better job than getting into a fight. You know.
It’s easy to get people to appeal to their amygdala. They are emotional centers of the brain. That will probably get a lot of reaction, along with a lot of views. Do you do you resist the urge to go that way to to to just provoke? It is possible that more people would like to see your videos and share them.
I’m fortunate to be in a situation where I don’t have my goal in mind right now, but I’m not going to ask for money or more attention. But what is pretty clear from research is that shouting at people and talking about how wrong they are and consequently how bad they are and like creating, you know, a set setting up the dichotomy of the battle of the conflict, is not good for your cause. It doesn’t convince people of things. It makes people to sides. That’s all it does.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
Is it Really Good to Be Censored? Is It Really Necessary to Be Aware of What You’ve Learned Over the Internet?
People will come up to you in real life and say that they are very thankful and grateful for what you have taught them and taught their kids. I believe that it is the same way online in regards to the comments section. Do you read comments and do you feel like the response that you get in the digital world mirrors what you get in the real world?
Yeah. Yeah. For the majority of the time. And like there are comments that are cruel to me sometimes and there are people who disagree with things that I’ve done in the past and in one way or another, because, you know, I am not shy about my feelings on some controversial topics here and there. And the and so I’m like, you know, I’m kind of fine with that? I think it’s taken time to understand who I am and where I come from, but I’m not really a person to some people. They don’t see me. They see me as a sort of a shell that contains a brand or a I don’t I don’t know. And and also I have gotten comfortable with the both the idea and the reality that I have more power than those people. They feel like they have the ability to throw a punch. I won’t feel it. And and also, if I throw a punch at that, they will feel like I just like stepped on them with a transformer robot foot like the that that you know you kind of when you when you’re on the Internet and you have a you have a following and you have. Status for lack of a better term is what you have. You kind of have to understand that you wield a lot more power than you feel like you wield. And I watch people all the time, and I, it really bugs me to be like, I’m not going to censor myself just because I have an army of angry people who will attack anyone I attack, and that we will come into their lives and make themselves absolutely miserable to the point where they have to delete their Internet history. I’m not going to censor myself just because of that. And I’m like, Well, it’s not really censoring yourself to not to to, like, recognize that you have more power than you once had.
That is really good self awareness. I mean, to recognize that you’d be punching down, so to speak, and with a pretty heavy blow if you decided to engage in that way. People may not know you can leave a mark on them, just because you are.
They have no idea. John and I, my brother, have created this content together. And we have been through times where there’s been pretty large groups of people who, you know, just kind of for fun, don’t like us. And they have they think it’s just fun and that we are having a good time, too. And we aren’t. We can’t say anything. We just have to, like, live through it. You know, it’s it’s a bad part of a good thing.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
The Internet of Things: I Know What You Are Reading about the Church and what I’ve Learned about It’s Presence. And What I’m working on now
Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know how it improves. I believe that it’s going to require a large number of individual people having lots of good, thoughtful thoughts, and a lot of good conversations, and a lot of time with this. I think a lot about the printing press. The Catholic Church could take over and say, “I think that you’re doing it wrong,” for people who disagreed with the church. and we’re going to share that information. We will be more responsive than you and we will be better at it. And it has so many parallels to that that sets of conflicts that we have now. It was a chaotic and messy time. It was very bad. There were lots of people who died. And it was it was a book like nobody thinks we shouldn’t have books. We figured out how to have books and have them not be societally destructive. When we were young, we couldn’t help but feel like we’d been living in a world that the church had more power than we did. We needed to move into a world where there was more individual agency. And I think we’re having that now. That isn’t a discussion about young people or screen time. That’s a conversation that every single one of us in the society we exist in right now.
I do think about that. The thing that I’m working on now, which I don’t know if it will ever come out, is is about what I think the Internet could be like if we were thoughtful and careful about it. It is very different than what we have now. And I think that that so like it’s you never feel like you’re in history when you’re. We always are. You don’t feel like you’re part of it. Our current situation is going to become part of a bigger story than most of the other things we’re considering in the next five years. We are. And we’re at the beginning of this revolution in communications. I know people who run large social media companies and they think about societal implications of what they do and they consider society and the world as one of their stakeholders along with their employees and their advertisers and their investors. But like, mostly the thing that we’re we’re fine with is like, okay, you’ve got this technology, use it how you can and make as much money as you can, because that’s how that makes sense. We haven’t really thought about how to do it in a way that’s really pro-social. We haven’t thought about how to sort of make the tool best for a human and best for human outcomes, because that’s really complicated and it’s kind of scary to say like, I’m going to use the social media platform to be happier. It’s like, Woo hoo hoo. That seems like they shouldn’t be able to push those buttons, but they can. So what? What is the future like? And and is it dystopian or is it utopian or is it a little bit of both? Because that’s sort of what the future always is.
The future. A little dystopian, a little utopian, all of it at the same time. It is an authentic way to look at it. It’s true. We don’t know how things are going to unfold. You will be surprised, if the impact of these technologies will get better? Will they get worse over time? Maybe it’s going to be both. We don’t have a lot of wiggle room because at the time we are using them we don’t understand them. We can develop an expertise in how to use them well, like Hank said, and at the same time we can sharpen our awareness of how they can be detrimental to us. Hank said that the pressures of being online can be tiring for someone with years of experience. He probably has a thicker skin than most. And frankly, that troubled me because Hank is Hank. I’m worried about regular people. I worry about young people. This is something I’m hearing about from my own children.
How people see you is what you want to make it seem like, with social media. Like your life is so perfect. Even though not everyone’s lives is perfect.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
Online Dating and the Pressures of a Teen Girl’s Self-Cognizance (I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t)
My daughter Sky will be having a conversation with me next week. About the pressures of being a teenage girl online. This is a conversation I will never forget. Plus, I’m going to sit down with the child psychologist about the impact this pressure can have on young people.
We are all just in this feedback loop of looking at perfect pictures and perfect photos even though we know they aren’t reality. We’re just looking at our worst days. Our worst moments are worse angles to other people’s best. You’re not going to feel great when you do that.
