Parenting Unmotivated Boys in a World of Gaming, AI & Porn.

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Boys are often assumed to be doing okay, a little behind girls for sure, but nothing serious. My guest today says that assumption is wrong. Boys are becoming less resilient and less ambitious, and the data backs him up. He's talking about American boys where he's based, but the OECD data across 64 countries indicates boys are struggling.
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They make up 60% of low performers in school, and in almost every developed nation, women now outgraduate men at university. So, if you've got a son who seems unmotivated, disengaged, or I don't know, just adrift, today's episode is about why that's happening and what we can actually do about it. I'm Rachel Richards, and this is Teenagers Untangled, the audio hug for parents going through the tween and teen years. Today's guest is Dr.
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Leonard Sachs, family physician, psychologist, New York Times best-selling author of Why Gender Matters, Girls on the Edge, and the Collapse of Parenting. He's visited over 500 schools worldwide in his new, fully updated edition of Boys Adrift looks at what's causing this phenomenon. By the end of this episode, you'll understand the research factors behind the issue and her practical
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how to pull a son back from video games and porn, and how to actively help him engage with the real world again. Lena, thank you so much for joining us today.
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Thanks for running me.
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What first convinced you that boys were adrift, and has much changed? In it's now nearly 20 years since you wrote the first edition.
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Indeed.
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So, as you mentioned, I'm a family doctor, and I'll just give you an example from my own practice. So, this boy is 16 years old. When his parents consulted me, they're very concerned about their son. He's not motivated, not doing well in school. He's very bright, but just doesn't care. He's getting low marks in most of his subjects, and he's basically failing Spanish. And he's not at all concerned. He's he's perfectly happy in his bedroom with his video games and his pornography. And father said to me, he's a goofball. He has his no ambition, no no motivation to succeed in the real world. He cares much more about his video games. Now the parents are very proud of their daughter, who's a star? Who's getting full marks in all her classes and is captain of the varsity soccer team? She seems to be doing well, but I happen to know that she is secretly cutting herself with razor blades on her upper inner thigh. She's actually consumed with anxiety. Both these kids have problems, but the problems they're having are very different. The boys' problems are very obvious, and on the surface, the girls' problems are concealed. And I encountered, I have encountered situations like this over and over and over again over my more than 30 years as a family doctor. Families, same family, same resources, same parents.
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The daughter is excelling in most domains, and the boy is not. The reverse pattern, where the boy is excelling and the girl is failing school, very very rare. So why is this? This is a fairly new phenomenon. 50 years ago, boys outperformed girls on many parameters in school. In 1994, in the United States, Myra and David Sadker wrote a book called "Failing at
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How Our Schools Shortchanged Girls, documenting how the high achievers, the valedictorians, the prize winners were disproportionately boys. Well, that's 30 years ago, and that's ancient history because now it's very different.
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And I've spoken on this topic in the United States using American data, in Canada using Canadian data, in England and Scotland using British data, and data specifically from England and from Scotland. This problem is widespread. It is not at all confined to the United States, as you observed, and it's getting worse. The gender gap in achievement is getting more pronounced. University enrollments now women outnumber men, and women greatly outnumber men among the highest performers. You know, and I've spoken on this topic for many different kinds of audiences.
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The director of the Toronto School District, sixth largest school district in North America, asked me to speak to the elected trustees of the Toronto District School Board because he wanted to initiate a program for gender-aware instructional strategies. The best way to get boys excited about Jane Eyre is different from the best way to get girls excited about Jane Eyre. The best way to get girls excited about computer coding different from the best way to get boys excited about computer coding.
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So he brought me to speak to the trustees, and the reaction was.
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Very hostile, very negative, and one of the trustees said, "Okay, so 50 years ago, men outnumbered women at the university. Now women outnumber men at university. So what? Big deal.
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The pendulum has swung. Men still have most of the money.
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This trustee said, "90% of the Fortune 500 CEOs are men. Most of the billionaires are men, and the few women who are billionaires, like Mackenzie Scott Bezos and Melinda French Gates, are the ex-wives of men.
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So men have most of the money and most of the power. Most of the politicians are men. Explain to me why we should be so concerned, because I don't see it, this trustee said. I said,"Yeah, I can explain in in three
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educational assortative mating. So, 50 years ago, if a man had graduated from a four-year university and had his qualification and was looking to marry a woman, he might have a number of qualifications in mind for his bride, but educational attainment was not one of them.
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If she was pretty, that would satisfy.
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Today, if a woman has graduated from a four-year university and has her qualification, and she's looking to marry a man, she's looking for a man who is accomplished and motivated as she is, and there are not enough good men to go around, and this is not confined to women who have a university qualification.
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In my own practice, I've known this woman since she was a little girl. This story, she's 20 years old at the time of this encounter, and I said to her, "I said, Lauren, I bumped into Brett the other day, and he's just going on and on about how great you are and how funny you are and how pretty you are. And Brett told me he's asked you to marry him twice. Lauren, why don't you want to marry the father of your two children? And she said, Doctor Sachs, I already got two babies at home.
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I do not need a third.
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If a woman, I think a lot of women can relate to that. If a woman
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is going to marry, she's looking for a man who will be at least an equal partner, or someone who's hardworking, responsible, reliable, and there are not enough good men to go around. And this is true across every demographic, not only in the United States, the same is true. So I show in the new edition, I've got a graph. I actually paid the Financial Times $450 for the rights to reproduce a graph from one of their articles, where they show the decline in coupling. So coupling is marriage plus cohabitation, decline in coupling and decline in fertility in the United States, in South Korea, in Thailand, in Peru, in all these different countries worldwide, you see the same dramatic drop in coupling and fertility. Because again, most women, if they're going to have a child, most women, not all, would like to have a father in the home to be an equal partner to share the work to help raise the child and as I said there are not enough good men to go around and there is no taper in that trend line so that's why we should care that was my response to the trustee women are less likely to thrive in a world where the men are adrift and unmotivated.
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So you're seeing a lot of this. I think a lot of my audience are seeing this too. I have had a lot of messages from people saying my son doesn't seem to be motivated. He doesn't seem to be that bothered by things. I get sometimes I get that about girls too. To be fair, in your book you talk about the several factors that lead into this, and your first one is the schools themselves, and that education has become structurally less boy friendly. Why is it less boy friendly?
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So education has changed in several ways over the last 30 years, which have had the unintended consequence of disengaging many boys, boys doing things that boys have always done, pointing fingers at each other, saying "Bang bang, you're dead, drawing pictures of weapons, writing stories where people get killed. Now gets yes, you have some great
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examples in the book of
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this. Yes, now gets you in trouble, so I was speaking in Dulwich, which is an affluent suburb of London. I was doing the Boys Adrift talk again using British data and English data, and afterwards, husband and wife came down to share their story.
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They have an older daughter, a younger son. Older daughter getting full marks, doing very well. Younger son not motivated, not doing well, so they moved him over to the boys' school to Dullitz Prep. Because for a boys' school to survive in this era, they have to know how to capture and motivate this boy.
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And first week at the boys' school, the teacher gave a choice of three writing assignments, and one of the writing assignments read as follows. You are a Roman gladiator. Tomorrow you must fight in the arena. How do you prepare today? That night, Mom came into her son's bedroom and said, "It's past 10 o'clock.
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It's time for lights out. And he said, "But I'm doing my homework. And she said, "Okay.
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She said it was the first time in his life that he wanted to stay up past his bedtime to work on a writing assignment. He was so excited. Okay, so tomorrow you fight in the arena. What do you do today? We get a chicken and chop it up, chop off its head, rip it to pieces, take the fat and smear the fat on your shield to make your shield slippery. So the other guys will go to get you and it'll slip.
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You can get him, and and then you drink the blood. And the parents were excited to share this story because this boy had done a complete 180. A boy who hated school became a boy who loved school. A boy who hated to write became a boy who loved to write. So, as I said, I've visited now more than 500 schools over the last 25 years in the United States, in Canada, in England, in Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, and I share what I've learned. It costs nothing to make a school more friendly to boys. All it requires is that the leadership has to care. The bad news is that at many schools the leadership doesn't care. There's quite a few schools now where you're not even supposed to use the phrase boys and girls because that reinforces the heteronormative binary. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the official guidance is that teachers are to refer to students in elementary school as purple penguins, not boys and girls, because boys and girls reinforces the heteronormative binary. It is not inclusive. It doesn't welcome non-binary or transgender students, well, that's a problem because if you're not allowed to use the term boys and girls in any official communication, it's hard to talk about gender-aware instructional strategies. And how do we get boys excited about Emily Dickinson? And how is that different from the way you get girls excited about Emily Dickinson? So at many many schools, there's now an institutional and systemic resistance. You know, I was I was leading a workshop for teachers at a school in Austin, Texas, and a teacher there told me how she's working towards her master's in education at the University of Texas at Austin, and she went to her professor and said, "I'd like to share with you this book by Dr.
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Leonard Sacks. I think you'd find it really interesting. And she held the book out to her professor, and the professor looked at the cover, the title,"Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences, and she told me the professor recoiled as if from an unclean thing, and the professor said, "I have no interest in reading such sexist rubbish at many leading schools of education, and this certainly includes Harvard, Columbia, Barnard Teachers College, University of Texas Austin, University of Wisconsin Madison, the notion that boys and girls are meaningful categories and that gender-aware instructional strategies might be useful is offensive. Will get you canceled as a bigot, and that's happened to me. So that's a challenge.
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It really is a challenge, and it's interesting because I've had people like Brendan Kryatkowski on here who is very measured about you know the the language people use where they say oh boys do this and girls and he says well boys do have feelings they do but we we sort of don't talk to them about their feelings when they're young, and they don't develop the language. But he doesn't say that they're not different, and I think it's I think it's very become very hard to have conversations because people are trying to correct for what they perceive to be sort of social norms rather than understanding that you can help boys to become more capable of, you know, nuance and talking about their feelings without then denying that there are differences. Well, and
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and it's not monolithic. So in my book, Why Gender Matters, there are 12 chapters. The last four chapters are on gender non-conforming, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, And intersex, so it's important to understand those variations. But there are also very robust differences.
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Boys develop more slowly than girls in in brain development, and it's two standard deviations of difference. It's a huge difference. Race and what do you mean? Okay, so two standard deviations of difference is a basic is a fancy way of saying there's huge differences. Girls reach full maturity and brain development by 22 years of age.
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Boys not until 30 years of age.
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Wow, differences between adults are small. It turns out on any parameter relevant to education.
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Differences between children are huge. How long can you sit still, be quiet, and pay attention? Researchers find no difference between a 22-year-old woman and a 30-year-old man. But when you compare a six-year-old boy with a six-year-old girl, you find he can sit still, be quiet, and pay attention for only about half as long. There are many six-year-old boys who absolutely have to stand, bounce up and down, and make buzzing noises in order to learn. As one teacher said to me, "When that boy sits down, his brain shuts off. He has to stand, bounce up, down, and make buzzing noises.
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It is unusual to find a 30-year-old man who has to stand, bounce up, and down, and make buzzing noises in order to learn. Sex differences diminish as a function of age. They're huge at age six. They're negligible at age 30. Even the 15-year-old boy may look almost like a man, but he's not. He's got another 15 years to go in terms of brain development, and the average 15-year-old boy can sit still, be quiet, and pay attention for only about 70% as long as the average 15-year-old girl. And again, most teachers are not aware of this research.
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Don't know how to accommodate it. You can accommodate these differences in the co-ed classroom. You make sitting optional for 5678-year-olds, Now, there's a lot to say about that, and I lead workshops for teachers because if you simply make sitting optional and you don't, so I led a workshop for Cunningham Elementary in Waterloo, Iowa, where they had an all boys classroom where they had, at my recommendation, made sitting optional. These were seven year old boys, second grade, and and the teacher had read the boys' story, and now they had to answer questions about the story. And one of the boys sitting, the boy on his right is is standing, twirling and making buzzing noises. The boy on his left, Tyrique, is down on the floor flopping around. He said, like a dead fish, he's trying to imitate a dead fish. And asked the boy who was sitting, I said, "Were you bothered by what Tyrique was doing? He said, "I don't know what was Tyrique doing. If you try this in a co-ed classroom without accommodation, and this girl is sitting, and the boy on her right is twirling and buzzing, and the boy in her left is flopping around on the floor, she's going to raise her hand and say, "Excuse me, how can I concentrate when this bozo is twirling and buzzing, and Tyrique is flopping around like a dead fish, she's not only aware of what Tyrique is doing; she can tell you what color socks Tyrique was wearing. Girls are much more likely to be aware of what's going on around them.
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Boys are much more likely to be oblivious at six or 10 or 14 years of age. So, how do you make sitting optional in the co-ed classroom? Well, students who want to stand go to the rear, where they can have a standing desk or they can work with a clipboard. But then you, the teacher, must move around the classroom. You have to be; otherwise, you'll have classroom management issues, and the boys at the back will be pushing each other. You're not allowed to touch your neighbor. So there's a lot to say about how you actually do this that I've learned from my visits now to more than 500 schools, but it can be done.
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It doesn't cost anything to make sitting optional, and can tell you about schools that have put these policies in place and have seen the boys surge and the girls do better as well. If you understand gender differences, you can break down gender stereotypes, and the same boy who loves football and video games will love Jane Eyre. Will love Emily Dickinson, and the same girl who loves Ariana Grande and fashion design will love physics. Will love computer science.
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Fascinating.
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And what would a parent look for in a school if they're going on a school tour, other than kids standing up?
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Unfortunately, you won't find many schools that have adopted that, unless they've been trained by me, very few co-ed schools do that. I learned that from the boys' schools. I visited a boys' elementary school in Montgomery County, Maryland, 20 years ago.
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Third grade boys, so these are eight-year-old boys. And after the boys had left, I said to the teacher, "The boys were very excited, jumping up and down to spell the word abbreviate, so the class seemed very successful. But after the boys had left, I I said to the teacher, "Where are the chairs?
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Why are there no chairs in this classroom? And she said, "Well, everybody knows when an eight-year-old boy sits down, his brain shuts off. And I said,"Excuse me, I didn't know that.
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And I I do have a PhD in psychology. I read the educational psychology literature. I'm not aware of any research to support your claim, but among the rather insular communities of boys' private elementary schools, it is well known that many boys learn better standing than sitting.
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And so, I, working with other researchers, especially a team at Stetson University in Deland, Florida, have found you can deploy this strategy in the co-classroom. You just have to be aware of the classroom management issues and and move around the classroom so that the boys are not making trouble. So how do you? Your question was how to identify a boy friendly school, and this is a major focus in the new edition of Boys Address. I provide many concrete tips for parents. One of which is ask to see the list of the highest achieving students. If there's 30 girls and three boys, that's a problem. That means this is a school where academic excellence is perceived as unmasculine. Boys can achieve at the same level of girls if they are motivated, but if this school is unfriendly to boys, the boys will not be motivated.
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Fascinating, yeah, that's a really good tip there. Like that, and one of the other factors that you talk about at length is the question of video games. As parents, we're all aware that video games have issues, but I think disentangling what those issues are and how we should manage our boys who want to play video games, because so many of them communicate using video games and spend a lot of their time on them, is a very very difficult task. So, what is your core issue with video games,
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okay. So again, my brand, if you like, is evidence based. When I make a recommendation, I'm going to show you lots of scholarly research in support of this, and I wrote that after really in close consultation with Craig Anderson, one of the world's leading researchers on video games. How much time spent playing video games is too much time, and how do we know? What's the effect of video games on academic achievement? Well, there is no effect below a threshold of about six hours a week. Boy who spends five hours a week does no better, no worse on average in terms of his marks at school, compared to the boy who doesn't play video games at all. But beyond six hours, there is a linear and negative association. A boy who spends 10 hours a week does less well than a boy who spends five hours a week. Boy who spends 20 hours a week playing video games does much less well. And as I said, I spoke with Craig Anderson, lead investigator on that study, and I asked him why is that, and he answered with one word: displacement.
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What Craig Anderson means by displacement is that if you're spending 20 hours a week playing video games, that's 20 hours a week you're not doing something else like studying or sleeping. So again, in the new edition, I provide very concrete, evidence-based guidelines. No more than 40 minutes a night on school nights, no more than an hour a day on weekends, and your minutes do not roll over. So if you go three weeks without playing video games, that doesn't mean you're allowed to spend seven hours on a Saturday that is binge gaming and is harmful, so that's how much time is spent playing video games, and we have good evidence to answer that question. But the next question is what video games are okay to play and which are not, and here again we have a very important longitudinal cohort study where researchers recruited kids at 12 years of age and then followed them for three years, and they found that boys who spent a lot of time playing violent video games like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, games where you get rewarded for killing those boys over three years' time become less honest, less patient, and more selfish, and it's a big effect. And you control for race, ethnicity, household income, language spoken at home, family composition, and parental involvement, because you could argue, well, boys who play video games have parents who are less concerned. Well, you control for parental involvement and parental concern after controlling for all those parameters. Boys who play violent video games become less patient, more selfish, and it's a big effect compared to, say, boys who spend the same amount of time playing a sports game like Madden football, NBA basketball, FIFA soccer. So I'm not recommending a prohibition on video games. the The evidence does not support that. But you must limit, govern, and guide what your what games your son is playing. You have to know the name of the game. So, Grand Theft Auto is a terrible game where you get rewarded for you have sex with a prostitute to restore your health to 100% and then you kill her to get your money back, and that's a good thing to do in the context of the game. But you're killing you're killing an unarmed civilian. So Grand Theft Auto is a really terrible game. And you go to CommonSenseMedia.org again throughout the new edition of Voice of Drift. I got very concrete recommendations.
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CommonSenseMedia.org and type in the name of the game, Grand Theft Auto. You type in Grand Theft Auto. It's going to say absolutely not. No child, no teenager, and probably no adult should be playing this game. It is sick and twisted and perverse, and it is. Don't wait for your son to outgrow this.
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Sometimes parents will say to me, "Well, I think it's just a phase. So parents, one one mom confronted her son, and she said, "What's the story? You roll out of bed late every day.
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You work a few hours a week at the coffee shop. You're 28 years old. You don't have a life, and so she insisted that he come speak with me. And he, I met with him in the office, and I said, "So tell me about yourself." He said, "I'm level a 120. Do you have any idea what that means? I said, "Yeah, I think that's a reference to World of Warcraft, the online video game. It means you've reached level 120 in World of Warcraft. He said, "I'll tell you what it means. It means I'm the best there is. There is nothing beyond level 120. I'm guild master. Do you have any clue what that means? I said, Yeah, I believe that's another reference to World of Warcraft.
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It means you're master of a guild in World of Warcraft. He said, I'll tell you what it means. It means there are people in Liverpool, England, in Johannesburg, South Africa, in Malaysia who bow down to me because of what I've accomplished in this game, I said, "Yeah, but but in the real world, you're living in your parents' basement and you don't really have a job. And he said,"Oh, so you're saying accomplishment in the meat world is more important than accomplishment in in World of Warcraft?
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I said, "Well, if by the meat world you mean the real world, yeah, that's a pretty fair statement of my position. I had to report to parents that I had accomplished nothing. This boy seems to be perfectly happy with his 55 inch flat screen and his video games, and being guild master. But Dad said he has no skills. What's going to happen after we're gone? We subsidize his lifestyle. Don't wait for your son to outgrow this. He may not outgrow it. The video games are so immersive and so rewarding in their own context that many boys can get lost in this world. You, the parent, have to shut the game down. You, the parent, have to limit, govern, and guide what your son is doing online.
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I think that's such important advice. And when I spoke to Dr. Dominique Thompson, she said that she she saw 70,000 students at university, and she'd get parents calling her saying, "Can you make sure my son's not gaming? He seems to be gaming all the time. She said, "I can't do that. That's not my job. You know, you need to do this before they leave home. Yes. So, okay.
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So, for parents who are listening to this, thinking,"Ah, you know, my son is already deep into gaming. What's the best approach?
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You have to be very blunt. You have to sit your son down and say, "We've been we've been doing some things wrong.
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We're going to make some changes. No more video game console in the bedroom. That's absolutely key. The video game console cannot be in the bedroom. No more than 40 minutes a night on school nights. No more than an hour a day on weekends. Your minutes do not roll over, and no violent games.
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Games where you get rewarded for killing. No Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed.
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Although these happen to be the most popular games in North America and the United Kingdom, no, you're not allowed to do this. And so, let me give you a story. Meg Meeker is a friend.
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She's also a pediatrician, and she and I have shared a podium and platform on multiple occasions. We were on the Today Show in the United States, but what really was valuable to me about that was the hours we spent together in the green room because we had like two hours waiting to go on. And she told me how she told her son at 12 years of age. She said, "No video games at all. Now that's not a recommendation I made, but that was her decision. You're not playing video games, and ever, at least not for a long time. And he said, "Are you out of your mind? This is what boys do. This is ridiculous. But she insisted, and and there was tension between them for years because she would not let up.
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And so he turns 18. He said,"Look, I'm a legal adult. I've got my own money I've earned from my part-time jobs. I'm going to go out and buy a video game console. And she was like,"Fine. So he buys a video game console. He buys a bunch of games, and he goes off to university. And one year later, towards the end of his freshman year at university, he called his mom. He said, "Hey, mom, I just got $400. Guess what I did?
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She said, "I have no idea. He said, "I sold my video game console and all my games.
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He said, "Mom, you wouldn't believe there's all these guys at college who expect you to be really impressed that they can kill 12 aliens in 10 seconds in Halo? And I'm like, but dude, you can't talk to girls. Look, the the brain is so plastic. I have been advising addicts for more than 30 years. One thing we know about addictions, and this is true of every addiction, is that the younger you are when you become addicted, the harder it is to quit. the The person who starts smoking cigarettes at 25 years of age will find it very easy to quit at 30. The person who starts smoking cigarettes at 12 years of age.
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And is smoking a pack a day at 14. The odds of them ever quitting are much lower than the odds of a heroin addict quitting his habit on his own. It's very long odds. If a boy at 1214, years of age becomes addicted to video games, it's very hard for him to give it up. At 18 years of age, the brain is much more mature, and now he can play video games and decide, ah, this is not for me. So you, the parent, must limit, govern, and guide how much time your son is playing video games and what video games he is playing.
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Yeah, and it's interesting because I seem to remember. I think it was in your book. You talking about how people would come to you with a son or daughter, even, and say they've. I think they've got ADHD. I need you to have a look at them, and you would discover that they had a video game in their room till late at night, and that this exhaustion that they suffered as a result of that would mimic the the the symptoms. So let's talk about ADHD because one of your issues is is I think it's you wasn't it who said that I think it might have been one of your other books. And also this ADHD medication, which you've warned can have an impact on boys if they start taking it quite young, can you explain why this might be an issue?
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Absolutely. So we now have 15 different studies showing that the most popular medications for ADHD, which are stimulants, Adderall, Vyvanse, Concerta, Meditate, Focalin, Detroit, these medications damage the motivational center of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, and this is generally not known to doctors in the United States. And I have I had a professor of child psychiatry at New York University who sent me a very angry email saying,"Dr. Sachs, you spoke last night on the topic of boys adrift, and the mother of one of my patients attended, and she said, "You claim that these medications damage the motivational center of the brain. Well, I'm a professor of child psychiatry, and I've never heard of any such research. And I sent her the 15 citations in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, which she could have found herself in five minutes' time if she had bothered to look, but she's very arrogant and condescending. She think figures she's a professor of child psychiatry. I'm just a family doctor. What do I know?
00:32:29.000 --> 00:34:06.210
This is very common in the United States and Canada. It's much less common in the United Kingdom. It happens, but it's much less common. An American teenager is 14 times more likely to be on medication for ADHD than a teenager in the United Kingdom, but the United Kingdom is an outlier compared to the continent. So I wrote a book for a French publisher titled "Les Gassant Pied Pierre, Etli Semet Tandger. Working with Isabelle Crouze and other colleagues in France, looking at the French data, we found that in all of France, there are fewer than 6000 kids on medication for ADHD. There are more kids in Birmingham, England, on medication for ADHD than there are in all of France, a nation of 67 million people. So, in the Anglo sphere, in the in the English speaking world, there is a tendency to overdiagnose and over treat, and to say, "Let's try Adderall and see if it helps. Well, we now know that these medications help normal kids as much as they help kids with ADHD. This is the work of John Gabrielli at MIT, And parents don't understand this, so I've done an assessment on this boy, and I say to the parents, "Look, your son doesn't meet criteria for ADHD; doesn't come close. And the parents say,"Yeah, but the other doctor prescribed Vyvanse, and it was so helpful. The parents are interpreting the response to medication as though the response to medication had some diagnostic significance. This medication was prescribed for ADHD. It was very helpful.
00:34:03.480 --> 00:34:23.900
Therefore, he must have ADHD, right? No, not right. John Gabrielli, Alan Struf, and many others now have shown that these medications help normal kids as much as they help kids with ADHD. Okay, so the medications help kids concentrate. They compensate for the sleep deprivation, their uppers.
00:34:20.900 --> 00:34:27.710
What's not to like? Why not just put all the kids on medication?
00:34:23.960 --> 00:35:15.869
As I said, we now have 15 different studies showing that these medications damage the nucleus accumbens, the motivational center of the brain, and that's why you you don't want to use them. There are safer medications, Wellbutrin, Stettera, and Intune, that are effective and do not pose that risk. So again, most doctors, certainly in the United States and Canada, are not aware of this research. So I own the copyright to Boys Adrifts. I say to parents, please photocopy. You have my permission. Photocopy chapters three and eight from. Ways adrift. Just be sure to photocopy the references at the end of the book and share this with your doctor and say,"Doctor, are you aware that these medications, Adderall, Vivance, etc. damage the motivational center of the brain? In the United States and Canada, the doctor will say no.
00:35:16.440 --> 00:35:31.880
In Germany, the doctor will say yes. I found this is well known when I spoke to parents and doctors in Munich. You know, in in the United States, we're we're really impressed by Harvard, Harvard Medical School.
00:35:26.570 --> 00:35:34.369
In in Germany, I found they regard Harvard Medical School as a tool of the drug companies.
00:35:34.610 --> 00:35:35.900
They're not at all impressed by Harvard.
00:35:36.739 --> 00:36:21.829
And and in the book, I mentioned how Joseph Biederman, chief of pediatric psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, acknowledged to Senator Charles Grassley in a testimony in front of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee that he had recently accepted 1.3 million dollars from the drug companies that he had not publicly disclosed. He's functioning as a paid spokesperson for the drug companies, and he's not disclosing that. I got a flyer from Harvard Medical School saying, "Come to Harvard, three-day conference on best practice in evaluation and management of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, led by the renowned Dr. Joseph Peterman. No mention of the fact that Dr. Biederman is functioning as a paid spokesperson for the drug companies, and he's getting much more money for the drug companies than he's getting from Harvard. So that's a real problem we have here in the United States-that's
00:36:21.829 --> 00:36:39.949
a massive, massive problem. Let's say I've got a boy and I'm thinking he might have ADHD. I don't know whether this is something that I should be pursuing. And and if they, the doctor says, oh, they might had. Oh, or the teacher says they might have ADHD. How do I sift through this information to help my son?
00:36:40.789 --> 00:36:59.260
So the new edition of Boys Adrift has very detailed guidance specifically on that question. I go through the five criteria for the diagnosis of ADHD to determine does your son truly have ADHD? What other conditions can mimic ADHD? I found that the teacher's observation is always accurate.
00:36:59.320 --> 00:37:37.639
If the teacher says this boy is not paying attention. He's not paying attention. The question is why is he not paying attention? So to go back to an example that you hinted at earlier, this particular boy did very well in elementary school, but then in middle school his grades began to drop. He was not doing well, and the teachers had filled out what are called Connor's scales, which are assessment of attention, and he's off the chart, not paying attention in any class. And the parents take him to the child psychiatrist, who looks at the Conner Scales, does an assessment, and the psychiatrist says, "Well, certainly looks like ADHD. Let's try Vivance and see if it helps. And the Vivance was tremendously helpful.
00:37:39.349 --> 00:38:31.369
Teacher called mom on day one that he was on medication, said,"Oh my goodness, what a difference! I had no idea Jason was so bright, but he got side effects: palpitations, loss of appetite, and parents saw articles I'd written for the New York Times and Time Magazine explaining concern about these medications. So they brought him to me for second opinion, and I said, "Does your son get plenty of sleep? And mom said,"Absolutely, we make sure he's in bed every night at at nine bedroom at 9o'clock. Wake him up next morning at six. That's nine hours. That's enough, don't you think? And I said to the boy,"Do you have a video game console in your bedroom? He said, "Of course, doesn't everybody? I said, "Were you playing last night? She said,"Yeah. I said, "When did you finish? He said, "Oh, 130. Mom's like, "You were playing video games at 130 last night. I said,"Is that pretty typical? He said, "Yeah, sometimes two, sometimes one, usually around 130. This boy needs at least eight hours of sleep a night.
00:38:31.460 --> 00:38:45.730
He's getting less than five. He is sleep deprived. Sleep deprivation perfectly mimics ADHD of the inattentive variety, which was his diagnosis from the psychiatrist. Vyvanse was tremendously helpful. What's Vyvanse? What's Adderall?
00:38:46.239 --> 00:38:55.389
They're amphetamines. They're speed. They compensate for the sleep deprivation. But the appropriate remedy for sleep deprivation is sleep, not schedule two amphetamines.
00:38:56.050 --> 00:38:56.110
Yeah.
00:38:56.380 --> 00:39:21.500
So I said to mom, "You got to get the video and console out of the bedroom. Mom didn't even know that her son was staying out past midnight, and I find this is common. Parents who don't even know that their son is playing video games after midnight don't even know that their daughter's scrolling through Instagram and TikTok at one in the morning. So you've got to be in charge. There should be no devices in the bedroom at 9o'clock at night.
00:39:17.610 --> 00:40:01.469
You take the phone from your kid and you put it in the charger for from now on. It's going to be in the parents' bedroom, and your daughter may protest, and she may say, "Well, if there's an emergency, let her know you still have your phone. If there's a true emergency, her friend is welcome to call you, and you will pick up, and you'll decide if this emergency warrants waking her up at two in the morning. It probably doesn't. This decision of whether or not to have a phone in the bedroom, it's not age appropriate to put that in the lap of a 14-year-old. What's your 14-year-old daughter supposed to say tomorrow in school when her friend says,"Hey, I texted last night at midnight. How come you didn't answer? Is she supposed to say,"Well, researchers at Stanford have found that sleep deprivation and adolescence is a major risk factor in the etiology of both anxiety." And depression-that's ridiculous.
00:40:01.530 --> 00:40:12.750
You can't expect a 14-year-old to talk that way. You have to allow her to say, "Hey, my evil parents take my phone away every night at nine. We'll have back till the next morning. You have to have the courage to be the evil parent.
00:40:13.829 --> 00:41:03.780
And I do that, and my kids won't admit it to their friends, but they secretly love it. And they're older now, but they still love it that I take the phones away. They'll sometimes resist a bit, but no, it's absolutely you know. I think I agree with you. I don't want to talk about endocrine disruptors because I think if people want to learn about that, read the book. I mean, it's you've got you've got so much data, you've got so much information in that book. It's a fantastic book. I'd like to talk about devaluation of masculinity and this idea that boys have lost cultural models and rites of passage that once taught them how to become men, and this really strikes at the heart for me of the problems that I'm seeing with kids, boys and girls, and and also that social media is showing values that aren't necessarily upholding.
00:41:04.349 --> 00:41:11.789
You know, what do you become when? So, can you talk more about what you've what you found in your research and how this is affecting boys?
00:41:13.378 --> 00:42:56.168
Right. So that chapter is titled "The Revenge of the Forsaken Gods, which is a great title. Was suggested me by one of my patients, Anders Ekloff, who's an anthropologist, he was telling me about tribes in in the South Pacific, indigenous people in South Pacific islands, who among some of these tribes, a boy does not become a man just by getting older. He has to earn it. He has to pass a rite of passage, and not all boys do, and so he told me how parents will make offerings to propitiate the gods, so that their son will succeed. Because there are some of these islands where a man is 40 years old, but he didn't pass the rite of passage, so he still addressed as a boy. He can't own property, can't marry a woman, so parents will sacrifice to the gods, and Andrews Echolov said to me, "We ignore that, and the forsaken gods will have their revenge. I said, "Whoa, that's great! Can I borrow that? So that's where the title comes from. We used to take the transition from boyhood to manhood very seriously. We no longer do. Parents are now very uncomfortable talking to their son about what does it mean to be a man. It seems very old-fashioned, and and parents don't know what to say. And so boys look to the internet. They look online, and what they find is Drake and Bruno Mars and Eminem, and really terrible role models, and I talk about how the culture has changed. The most popular movies, the most popular TV shows, 50 years ago featured men who were knowledgeable, competent, reliable, thoughtful, productive, caring, and kind.
00:42:56.918 --> 00:43:03.509
Not true today. When you actually look at the most popular TV shows, none of them.
00:42:59.168 --> 00:43:18.148
None of them portray men who are competent, knowledgeable, responsible. Not in the real world. You have to go into fantasy worlds with superheroes, and that's not going to work.
00:43:15.059 --> 00:43:18.599
It's not going to work. That you use The
00:43:18.630 --> 00:43:20.190
Simpsons, don't you, as an example?
00:43:21.478 --> 00:43:59.108
Yes. So Homer Simpson, the longest-running TV show,"The Father is an Idiot, or"Modern Family, another popular show in the United States, where the straight father's plots and his three children are more knowledgeable and insightful than they are. And you compare that in the United States to 50 years ago, 60 years ago, the Andrew Griffith Show, where the father is always knowledgeable and competent, or in the 1980s, family ties where the father is knowledgeable and competent, or 1990s into 2007, seventh heaven, where the father again is knowledgeable and competent. As recently as 20 years ago, we still had shows where the father is knowledgeable and competent.
00:43:59.708 --> 00:44:17.518
In 2024, I reviewed the 100 most popular TV shows in the United States to see how many of them, at least occasionally, depict a father as knowledgeable and competent. Out of 100 shows, I found one, Blue Blood, starring Tom Seller, where the father is knowledgeable and competent, and that show is now off the air.
00:44:18.478 --> 00:45:06.929
So, boys looking at TV shows or or the most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 now find men who are either incompetent or disrespectful or both in the United States. Lil Nas X had huge success with his song Old Town Road, 19 Weeks, number one most popular song in the United States, which is an incredible achievement. Very few songs have ever done that. 19 weeks at number one, in which Lil Nas X sings, "You can't tell me nothing. Can nobody tell me nothing? So I talk about the culture of disrespect. That that summarizes the culture of disrespect in one line. Can't nobody tell me. Nothing. That's not a good role model for a boy.
00:45:02.159 --> 00:45:13.259
So, in in the new edition of my book, Boys Adrift, I talk about how you have to mindfully and intentionally create a different culture, a culture of respect.
00:45:13.918 --> 00:46:05.518
You have to find men, real men, maybe a coach, maybe a pastor, maybe a custodian, anybody that your son can meet with once a month is plenty. Be accountable to, and I share stories of organizations like an organization called Boys to Men, and how successful they have been. And I interviewed some of their graduates, men now in their 20s, and I gave their real names and shared their stories in the new edition of Boys Adrift. Boys who were going in the wrong direction at 1516, years of age, and joined this program, and it turned them around. So, in order to become a good man, a boy must see a good man. That in our popular culture today, they're not there, so you have to find good men to teach you.
00:46:07.318 --> 00:47:12.539
It's interesting, isn't it? Because I interviewed a man this at the beginning of this year who had grown up in a household where his father was an alcoholic. He was not a good dad, and he said he got to the point where he was married and his marriage was going off the rails, and he couldn't figure it out. And his wife just held a mirror up to him. And what he did was he went out and found what he called his Iron Five, and he found five men that he really admired and asked them to mentor him. Said, "How do you do this? How are you? How are you so fit and strong? How are you making money? Like, what are you doing? And those men said, "Yeah, okay, I'll mentor you. And I think that's such an interesting thing to do, you know. And I think, like you said, you've suggested in your book that us parents, it's really very, very important to look around the community, look around for people who we can connect our children with, who can show them what it is to be a decent human being. And you know, when you talk about healthy masculinity, what would you define that as nowadays?
00:47:12.929 --> 00:47:49.570
So I'm not trying to prescribe one solution for everybody, but a good place to start is using your strength in the service of others. There's boys' school I visited, where they sent the teams of 16 boys with four men to the highlands of the Dominican Republic. Not not the beaches where the tourists go, but back in the hill country where the peasants live, and the boys live with the peasants sleeping in their home, which means on a dirt floor, and there are rats, and the you eat what the peasants eat, which is rice and beans, and it's hot, and there's no air conditioning.
00:47:46.630 --> 00:48:05.039
I would pay a lot of money not to go, and the boys are building a bridge of wood over so that the peasants, and that's what they're doing. But the boys told me it was the most meaningful experience they've had because they're learning through their sweat what it means to be a man.
00:48:05.250 --> 00:48:29.059
It means using your strength in the service of others, and they come back and they watch American football on a Sunday afternoon and see a beer commercial that says being a real man means drinking Miller beer, and they can laugh at that. They can laugh at that because they know no, it's got nothing to do with that. Being a real man means using your strength in the service of others. So you need to think about what's your definition.
00:48:26.719 --> 00:48:35.449
What do you want to teach your son? What do you think it means to be a real man? But using your strength in the service of others, I think, is a good place to begin.
00:48:36.469 --> 00:49:08.219
I think it's a fantastic quote. I think it's good for women too. I think this this makes us matter, and and working for others actually makes us happier. That you do have a chapter that wasn't in the books before, and is about pornography, AI, and the manosphere. Now you argue that porn AI companions and manosphere content are combining to pull men away from real relationships entirely, which is actually really terrifying, and you're saying it's more common than many realize, and it's growing. Talk us through this.
00:49:09.090 --> 00:49:28.880
So the subtitle of the previous edition was the five factors driving the growing epidemic of unmotivated boys and underachieving young men. For the new edition is the six factors. There's a new factor with three components. The three components of the new factor are pornography, AI girlfriends, and the manosphere, as you just said. And people say,"Pornography? Come on, there's nothing new about pornography.
00:49:29.000 --> 00:49:35.659
Pornography's been around forever. And I said, "Yes, but it has changed. First of all, it's become much more violent.
00:49:36.260 --> 00:50:19.530
As recently as 2000, only 20 percent of the most popular porn videos were violent. Now, 60 of the most popular porn videos are violent. Many of them unlawful in the United Kingdom because in the United Kingdom it is unlawful to possess pornography depicting rape, but is very widespread in the United Kingdom. Researchers find there's no enforcement, so it's become much more. Violent and strangulation. Yeah, Debbie Herbeneck and her colleagues here in the United States last year found that 67% of women at university report being strangled, choked by the man during intimacy, often on a first date. And the woman was like, "What are you doing? And he's like, "Don't you like it?
00:50:16.679 --> 00:50:19.530
"No, I don't like it.
00:50:19.590 --> 00:50:19.650
"No.
00:50:20.789 --> 00:50:43.358
The the Guardian had an article saying choking has become so common the men don't think they need consent because they've been raised on porn from 1214 16 years of age where the actress is pretending to like it and and so schools will hire me to speak to boys about porn and I'll say to the high school boys girls don't like to be choked.
00:50:40.338 --> 00:50:49.539
Don't do it, and the boys will say, "Oh yeah, they do. They love it. No, they don't. The pornography is lying to you.
00:50:46.358 --> 00:50:57.188
Look, I can tell you that secular independent schools and state schools. I've heard from many boys that the health instructor at high school has
00:50:57.398 --> 00:52:17.429
no pregnancy, no sexually transmitted disease and consent, and boys have told me the health instructor is encouraging them to masturbate over pornography because it checks all three boxes: no concern about pregnancy, check; no concern about sexually transmitted disease, check; and no problem with consent, check. But they've never had any instruction about the lies pornography is cheating them, like the notion that women like to be strangled. They don't. They've never been told about pornography-induced erectile dysfunction. So, in the new edition, I cite a very recent study showing that among young men, 18 to 30 years of age, who watch a lot of porn, 50% 49% to be precise, have erectile dysfunction. They can't get it up with a real woman versus 12% of boys who are not watching a lot of porn. So yeah, this is a problem. The boys have never heard this, but the big change. What's really different about the new pornography? Until literally just five years ago, a boy was looking at porn. He was looking at images someone else had created, he was looking at photographs someone else had taken, but now any boy with a laptop or an iPad using an app, an AI-powered app like Nano Banana or Sea Dream, can speak his fantasy. And 20 seconds
00:52:17.518 --> 00:53:04.349
professional-grade porn. You know the the word abracadabra has traditionally been understood to derive from the Aramaic abara kadabra, which means I speak and it comes into being. That's the essence of magic. I speak and it comes into being. And a 15 year old boy told me, it's like magic. I speak my fantasy into my iPad, and then there it is, incredible porn. This boy is creating hardcore porn. He's never kissed a girl, and it is compelling and it is addictive. We have a recent study published earlier this year here in the United States, a survey of teenagers, 13 to 17 years of age, finding that 42% of American teenage boys are now using these apps to create their own porn, and it is addictive. It is compelling.
00:53:02.338 --> 00:53:16.949
We're going to touch on the manosphere as well with a story from my own practice. My own practice as a family physician, not in my office though. So these parents ask me to meet with their son via Zoom. They're very upset. He's at university.
00:53:14.159 --> 00:54:16.949
He said he just dumped his girlfriend. Well, that's no big deal, but it's what he said. He said he doesn't want another girlfriend. He said he prefers AI girlfriends, and Mom said,"Doctor Zach, do you know about AI girlfriends? I said, "Yeah, I know about AI girlfriends. So he set up a time for me to talk to this boy, and I said, "So, what's your understanding of why your parents insisted that you talk with me? And he said,"Well, they were upset when I dumped Louise. I said, "Yeah, that's what they told me. So, so why'd you dump her? He said,"She was fat. She wanted me to take her places, do stuff. 1995 a month. I said, "What, what, what, what's 1995 a month? And he mentioned his AI girlfriend, and he said, "And she's way prettier. I said, "But, but she's not real. Wouldn't you rather be intimate with an actual woman, and he said, "What is real, and who are you to judge? He said, "I'll tell you something, Doctor Sachs. Reality is boring. Reality is lame.
00:54:11.128 --> 00:54:30.349
Reality sucks. the The advice I get from my AI girlfriend's way better than any advice I've ever gotten from any human, and the orgasm I get from Jasmine, his AI girlfriend, way better than anything I've ever gotten with an actual woman.
00:54:31.639 --> 00:54:48.849
He said, "I'm not an incel. You know what I'm talking about? I said, "Yeah, involuntary celibate. You're not an incel. I get it. He said, "I'm not an incel. I could totally have sex with women if I want to, but I don't want to. Women made of meat disgust me. They turn me.
00:54:44.440 --> 00:54:55.059
Oh my goodness! They turn me off. I'm I'm a man going my own way. You know what I'm talking about? I said, yeah, migtow. So he's referring to another
00:54:55.269 --> 00:55:30.289
men going their own way. M G T O W pronounced migtow. I said,"Yeah, Migtow, I'm a man going my own way. So I had to report to the parents I had accomplished nothing. This young man seems, as near as I can tell, very happy with his 55-inch flat screen. Actually, got two screens going when he's masturbating. On one, he's doing phone sex with his AI girlfriend. On the other, he's got a roll of images that he's prepared-a new different image every three seconds, autopilot.
00:55:25.190 --> 00:55:44.019
Look, I've counseled, as I said earlier, I've counseled addicts for more than 30 years. I have a lot to offer the addict who wants to quit, and I'm pretty confident I can help him or her.
00:55:39.079 --> 00:55:46.150
I have nothing to offer the addict who doesn't want to quit.
00:55:46.599 --> 00:55:46.780
No, if
00:55:47.228 --> 00:55:50.378
he doesn't want to quit, there's nothing I can do.
00:55:50.378 --> 00:56:38.838
There's and again, it's evidence based. If you don't, if the addict doesn't want to quit, you're not going to be effective. So, parents, you must limit what your kid is doing online. You must install a parental monitoring app, and you must install it correctly. And Jean Twangy, in her new book "10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech World, two chapters of her book, Chapter Six and Nine, she walks you through how to install these apps so your kid cannot uninstall them, cannot get around them. You must explain to your kid, "No, I will not allow you to have an AI girlfriend here in the United States. We had a survey published last year by Common Sense Media showing that 72% 72% of American teenagers now have AI girlfriends or boyfriends. 1/3 of those prefer talking to their AI companion over talking with an actual human being.
00:56:39.108 --> 00:56:39.289
Goodness.
00:56:40.099 --> 00:57:00.989
So there's no law, there's no regulation in the United States or the United Kingdom that limits, that prohibits kids from having AI companions. Parents, you have to do this. We can't wait for the government to act. A lot is at stake. You must be the authoritative parent and limit what your kid is doing online.
00:57:01.980 --> 00:57:04.260
Oh my goodness! It's such an important point.
00:57:04.289 --> 00:57:24.409
It's quite scary. If a parent is listening to this, you've given us so many great tips. Is there anything particular you'd like to tell parents of sons about what they can be doing to build genuine ambition and resilience and and a desire to get on in the meat world, as they put it.
00:57:24.530 --> 00:57:52.510
Yeah. So you need to prioritize the parent-child relationship at every age, not only in childhood but in adolescence. Boys want to be men, but unfortunately, I'm finding many men in the United States and United Kingdom who want to be boys, fathers of 10-year-olds who are asking their 10-year-olds to teach them how to play video games. Don't do that. Think of something you love and something you're good at, and teach that to your kid.
00:57:47.800 --> 00:58:17.519
So I love sailing. I learned to sail at summer camp as a kid. I don't own a sailboat, but there's a park nearby, State Park Marsh Creek, where you can rent one for a day for 50 bucks, and I taught my daughter to sail, and she loves to sail. And last time we went sailing, most recently, they should never let us go out. The winds were very high, and we capsized. And by capsized, I mean the boat went flying through the air, somersaulting, and threw us out.
00:58:17.969 --> 00:58:36.920
And my daughter said it was the most fun she's ever had. Think of something you love, whether it's hiking or cycling or mountain climbing or baking or making music. Teach that to your kid. Engage them in the real world. Build that parent-child relationship. That's my strongest advice.
00:58:38.179 --> 00:58:44.139
I think that's absolutely brilliant advice, Leonard. Gosh, such so much to chew on there. I love the book.
00:58:44.289 --> 00:59:03.838
I think it's so interesting and important for us to be thinking thinking about these points. And you've given us so many great tips. Now there are also a lot more in the book. I'm not trying to sell it, but I really do think it's you know these are just fascinating topics that you're covering. If people want to get hold of you, what's the best way for them to do that?
00:59:04.409 --> 00:59:18.480
Go to my website lenardsax.com l e o n a r d s a x.com, and there you'll find my email address. And I try to respond to every email, and you'll also be able to see my list of upcoming events. See if I'm speaking somewhere near you.
00:59:19.889 --> 00:59:25.190
Brilliant! Thank you so much. If you found this useful, please right now send it to someone you know.
00:59:25.460 --> 00:59:43.449
Anybody who might benefit from it-teachers, friends, you know, relations, anybody-because that's the way we share and we build our community. If you want to get in contact with me, it's teenagersuntangled@gmail.com. My website is teenagersuntangled.com. You can find all the links in the podcast notes. Have a great week! Bye bye for now.