The Dr. John Delony Show - Off the Record With Dr. K: This Interview Changed My Mind

Episode Date: February 28, 2026

🔥 Microhabits for a better marriage. Download the Together app.   On today’s episode, John talks with psychiatrist and lifelong gamer Dr. Alok Kanojia about raising technologically smart kids, the effects of porn, and why you need to “de-Hollywood” your marriage.   Next Steps: ❤️ Get away with your spouse today! 📞 Ask John a question! Call 844-693-3291 or send us a message. 📚 Building a Non-Anxious Life 📝 Anxiety Test 📚 Own Your Past, Change Your Future ❓ Questions for Humans Conversation Cards 💭 John’s Free Guided Meditation 🤘🏼 The Dr. John Delony Show Merch   Connect With Our Sponsors: Head to Beam and use code DELONY for an exclusive discount—because better sleep, energy and focus start tonight. Get 10% off your first month of BetterHelp. Get up to 20% off with code DELONY at Cozy Earth.   Get 20% off when you join DeleteMe.  Visit Hallow for a 90-day free trial. Visit Helix Sleep for special offers!  Working knives for working people—go to Montana Knife Company to see what’s available now! Explore Poncho Outdoors! Head to Shady Rays and use code DELONY for 40% off two or more polarized sunglasses. Get 25% off your order at Thorne.   Visit Zander Insurance or call 1-800-356-4282 for your free instant quote today.   Explore More From Ramsey Network: 🎙️ The Ramsey Show 💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights  🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 💡 The Rachel Cruze Show 💰 George Kamel 🪑 Front Row Seat with Ken Coleman 📈 EntreLeadership Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People say when you have kids, you don't know the meaning of love until you have kids. I didn't know the meaning of fear until I had kids. I think most of the reasons that people struggle in life is because they're not taught how to live it. We've got a good thing going, right? We're in love, it's good, we've got a couple of kids. But there's a huge difference in everything that you just said in this, which is all of those things, me and you, against that thing out there. What's up?

This is John. Welcome to Off the Record. This is an additional drop for the Dr. John Deloney show where I bring in folks from a variety of different backgrounds, experiences, people that I think are cool, people that I know I disagree with, people that I know are going to challenge me. And I bring them in four people that I just love. And we sit down and have a great conversation. Today I'm super hyped. This is once a long time coming And this is I brought him on as a response to one of the most common conversations people ask me to talk about

And that is relationships and technology technology and kids technology and interrupting adult relationships I brought in he's known to the world as the quote unquote healthy gamer he's known as Dr. K His name is Alec Kenogia he is awesome I'll call him Dr. for the rest. That's how he goes. I'll tell you introduce himself. He is the best. He's a super kind guy, very relatable. And in this episode, he nailed me to the wall. He's a, he's a, psychiatrist. He's a still practices. But he also has written great books and talks at length on tons of different media platforms about the dangers of technology and the good stuff about technology and how to integrate those things into a healthy home. So an awesome conversation.

Kelly says it's her favorite conversation I've ever had. And I think that's because he nailed me to the wall. And I walked away from this conversation, literally changing the way I do things inside my own house. And so buckle up for my conversation with Dr. Kay. All right. So you've, I've got two kids. You got two kids. Yep. If you and I are just sitting down having not chose no we're having papacitos because we're back in houston okay which is the best we're sitting there sharing chips in caseo okay what is as you look ahead what's the thing that makes you the most like nervous as you look at or the thing you're most worried about that your two kids are gonna enter into in the world they're inhabiting oh that's that's such a great question so i'll start by

saying this, you know, people say when you have kids, you don't know the meaning of love. Yeah. Until you have kids. I think what they don't advertise, I didn't know the meaning of fear until I had kids. I feel, I felt, I still remember there was one time that my kid was jumping on a trampoline and she like fell off. Like, you know, she was, she had a trajectory where she was going to be off of the trampoline. And in that moment where she like cleared the edge of the trampoline and was like plummeting towards the ground, I felt. a degree of fear that I had never felt in my life.

I don't think I'm very scared about a particular thing. I mean, I think, you know, our children have their own path in life. You know, I do feel, so I have two daughters, so I think there's a lot of concern about who they decide to be with. Sure. Right. But I think it's also like all that stuff is, see, a lot of fear is about what we haven't experienced yet. right and so

I'm not scared about a particular thing like I guess maybe dating in general yeah yeah but in general like I think it's like you know I think they're I'm not super scared about their future I know it may sound weird but oh I love that because I think

it it in the barbell that is not worried about anything and I'm terrified about everything the ecosystem if you just spend your life scrolling your ecosystem is everything is to be feared right oh yeah

But when both of us get to experience real people in real lives on a regular basis, it's like, no, there's just kind of a broad human experience, and they're going to have ups and they're going to have downs. Absolutely. And I think what I've learned from my kids and my patients and stuff like that, I remember asking my mom when I was in med school, I asked her, like, isn't it hard? She's a pediatrician. And so isn't it hard to, like, deal with sick kids and, like, you know, kids who get hurt? And I remember one day I went with her on Christmas Day. I went with her to the hospital, and she had a patient who had been run over by a tractor.

And so I was like, isn't that, like, impossible to deal with? Because these are, like, you know, kids that have been just so grievously wounded. And she was like, no, it's actually, like, easier if you're a pediatrician because kids heal. Right? So even if a kid has some neurological problem or something like that, like, there's still, there's a lot of neuroplasticity. There's a lot of, like, stem cell activation and, like, kids heal. And I think human beings, you know, that really struck me. And then what I've learned is human beings are incredibly resilient.

And I think as long as we understand kind of who we are and how our physiology works, how our brain works, a touch of spirituality thrown in. Like, you know, I think my kids have taught me that they're going to live their life no matter what plans I have. Oh, man. You know? Yeah, that's the one constant as I've been wrong every time. Like, you should. Nah, it's not going to work that way. I hadn't thought about that.

but you have the the benefit of seeing somebody in a challenging moment whether psychiatrically, physically or whatever and you've got a like a well of people

that you've seen on the other side of that. Oh, absolutely. That they're well or they're whole or they're as well as they're going to be and they're living full lives, right? Yeah, so I think, you know, people think that like,

and I'm sure you've seen this too, you know, I mean, I can see that you're speaking from experience with the people that you worked with. But I think a lot of times, you know, we think that helping people may be hard from a medical perspective, from a therapy perspective, but once you start to see success stories, right, once you start to see what human beings are truly capable of. And for me, the biggest thing is I think most of the reasons that people struggle in life is because they're not taught how to

live it. Right. So we have so much formal education in like mathematics and chemistry. We have zero formal education in emotions. We have zero formal education in ego. relationships, right? And if you really look at like, we have zero formal education and like finding purpose, right? But if you look at like the things that make a human being happy, healthy, resilient,

we don't actually teach him that, but we'll put them in school for eight hours a day for at least 12 years to teach them everything except for how to live life. Oh, man. And so I find that a very low quantity of education can help people an immense amount. Yeah. So, yeah, do that, okay, that's perfect. And here's why. I have, over the last 20 years, sat with an increasing amount of substance abuse with with young people and their parents, substance abuse, pornography, all these different addictions. And one of the big meta themes I've picked up is the addiction isn't the problem. It's solving something. It is this numbness or this lack of skills to go do.

whatever's next and then all of a sudden we create we keep having these increasingly vibrant umming agents that that makes sense absolutely so what do you think is what what has been if an addiction is basically a solution right it's it's a problematic solution but it's a solution what do you think is growing on on the inside that's causing people to move towards addiction the the aha moment i had and i remember it specifically, I think it was in 07 or 08, when I was working to college students, when someone was academic nerd conferences, but that when a body is disconnected from a root set of relationships, the instant it recognizes it's lonely, that neurologically, sex and alcohol are somewhat substitutes for this chem chemically. And I was working with college students.

anyone who works at college students are worried about sex and they're worried about alcohol consumption. And then I was like, oh, so we unplug a human being from everything they know, drop them in a box full of 200 or 400 or 1,000 strangers, and their poor brains are screaming for some sort of connection. And they have these pseudo-offrams. And nowadays, they don't even have to leave the room. They can just plug right in and they have these pseudo-sexual encounters all day, every day.

And the root of that cancer is I got a lonely 19-year-old, or I've got a desperately alone, like frantically alone, 18-year-old that's been unplugged from everything and just dropped into a box. And that humanized that kid that I had reduced to, you only need to stop having so much unsafe sex or you only to stop all the alcohol consumption, instead of going, oh, no, no, that makes sense.

I guess my responsibility is somebody who's working with college students is, I've got to get you all connected. ASAP or I got to reexamine what are we doing to these poor kids right and so loneliness to answer your question is a is a route that I keep seeing come up over and over I think it makes a lot of sense you know I think when we're talking about addictions there's the behavior itself so a lot of parents especially if we're talking about things like technology and stuff like that I mean I hear this all the time where you know how do I get my kid off of the iPad or less time on the computer or PlayStation or whatever and and to understand that any behavior if you just try to take

it away, there's going to be a lot of friction, a lot of resistance. It's like kicking somebody's crutch out from underneath them. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it, I don't, yeah, I think a crutch is a little bit different because I think you really need the crud. That's fair.

That's fair. Like if you've got a broken leg or something. But yeah, absolutely. I think the key thing that I think most professionals who work with humans stumble into is there's a fuel that's driving the addiction. Yeah. And if you really want the addiction to melt away, if you want it to kind of expire all, of its own accord, it's really about understanding

what is the fuel that's driving it. And you sort of mentioned technology, and it's not just sex, because nowadays, we have things like OnlyFans, right? And so OnlyFans is gonna activate the brain in a way that even pornography doesn't. Because there's this parisocial relationship. When you think about pornography, you're like a passive consumer,

but now what's happened with OnlyFans is these people are like influencers. You can message them, They say your name. They say your name. They give you shoutouts, all this kind of stuff. So it's not just the sex now. Now there's all of these, you know, parisocial relationships.

Social media is the reason that it is so addictive. And the reason that it grows so much is because it activates the social parts of our brain. And it satisfies us. I love what you kind of said about an insufficient off ramp, right? So you have this crippling loneliness. you have a lot of isolation. People are, you know, on the one hand, technology allows us to stay in touch, but it kind of disconnects us.

Yes, yeah. You know? It's gas station food, right? Absolutely, right? So it's like highly processed. I mean, you can get some degree of connection. And, you know, I met a guy playing video games when I was 13 years old. The first time I met him in real life was the day that I got married and he came to my

wedding. So there can be very real, authentic connections. But there's no way that that person can. give you a hug, you can't get the oxytocin. You know, there are some things that online relationships can't provide. And what's scary is, is all these platforms are getting better at substituting for a real relationship. That's why there's so much comments and so much interaction and things like that. So in that regard, a comment section can almost serve as though I'm participating in a real relationship. Yeah. So I would say that it does serve as some kind of

It's like the candy that says low fat. Like I'm pretending that's healthy. Yeah. So in a comment section, and I don't know if you've, you know, you've done this or not, but like there's a lot of like great engagement. Yeah. Right. So it used to be like, okay, if I watch a movie, I'm like, okay, that movie was great. But now the actors in the movie are responding to my comments. I'm responding to their comments. We're seeing a trend actually, especially on TikTok where there's a lot of like video responses that really cause, you know, particular clips. to grow. And it feels like I'm in it. Absolutely. And so the more that they create a platform that allows you to feel like you're in it, the more addictive it's going to be, the more of your brain it's going to activate. And it'll sort of manage that loneliness, right? So when you talk about gas station food, it'll give you calories, but it may not give you nutrition. There you

yeah. Yeah, it'll cost you in the long run. It might get you to tomorrow. But yeah, yeah. And that's something that I see that's really scary is, you know, one of the things that really frightened me so i i work predominantly with um about 70 30 men women in average age of about 32 it used to be 24 but one of the really scary things is that you know when you feel lonely like we think that that's bad right like we feel like it feels bad to feel lonely but that's our brain telling us our heart telling us our soul telling us like hey this is a signal to connect yeah why do we feel hungry why do we feel thirsty it's our it's our organisms way of telling us hey you need something.

Yeah. So the really scary thing that I see is that as people engage with these online relationships, if you fill up your stomach with gas station food, you'll still develop a nutrient deficiency. And the reason you'll develop that nutrient deficiency is because you no longer feel hungry. So your desire to eat an apple won't be there. Yeah. So people are actually like shutting down that signal from within themselves, that motivation to form real connections, is now being satisfied by these. really shallow online connections.

So it's almost like pulling out a can of spray paint and spray painting your dashboard on your car while you're driving as though like I'm not going to, I don't want any of these lights that are telling me the status of this car. I don't want to know. I'm just going to put my head down and keep going. Right, yeah. And eventually that car runs out of gas and pulls over.

Absolutely. And that's what's so scary is that we're shutting down our motivational circuitry that causes us to fix our problems. Okay. Right? When I'm working with someone who's gotten an addiction, you know, they're maybe drowning out,

they're going through divorce, they're on probation at work, whatever, right? So they have all these problems in their life and they feel bad about them. And once you start drinking, once you start hitting the bottle, you're no longer in all those, like all that numbness sets in,

you're not actually fixing your relationship. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not actually improving your performance at work. So we're actually shutting down all of these negative emotions that we have are our motivators to fix our life, right? Shame tells us, hey, something that I'm doing is not acceptable to the people around me. Guilt tells us something I'm doing is not acceptable to me. Anger can tell us, hey, something that someone is doing to me is not okay. Yes. Right? But as a culture, we've said, if you feel guilty, we need to fix that.

Oh, yeah. We need to take that feeling away. Yeah, absolutely. Or if you feel shame, or if you, like, we're taking, we're extracting basic human physiology from the playbook. Yeah. And pathologizing it instead of saying, no, what is that trying to tell you? What's your body trying to tell you? Yeah.

So, I mean, even when I, you know, when I prescribe medication, I'm super careful. I use medication about 30% of my patients. And so I think it absolutely has a role. But like the goal is to manage your emotions in a way where you can actually still feel them all. We don't want them to be overwhelming to the point that they cripple you. But we absolutely want you to be feeling anxious, right? That's how you know that something is important. That's how you know what to pay attention to.

And so like what we're seeing a lot of is just a lot of whole scale numbing. And then once you start numbing yourself, the problems get worse. That's why the way I describe it to one. person. I had a season when I took anxiety meds about a decade ago. And the way I described it is anxiety was a smoke detector and I ignored it so long. It was so loud. And what the meds did for me was it didn't heal my anxiousness, which I don't want it to. Because my body's trying to tell me something. It turned that alarm down enough so that I could go hear a counselor. I could go hear my wife. I could go hear these group of friends and I could go do the stuff, right? Instead of just sitting like this,

right but um so whether you are a wife a mother a husband a son a daughter listening to this everybody's impacted nowadays by this question you work with predominantly young men what's the role of pornography in their lives give us a landscape of what's the role in their life and i take a lot of calls on my show from wives who stumble on it. Oh, yeah. Or from moms who stumble on their teenage sons, uncleared search history, or a girlfriend who just, or a guy who's like, I can't stop doing this and I don't know what's wrong with me.

Yeah. Paint me a picture of the problem with pornography in our current culture and then head me towards some sort of solutions. Because here's the other thing. Talking about OnlyFans and talking about just social media, we're here. It's not mainstream yet, but we're here where there will be. a undistinguishable AI companion. Oh, yeah.

Pornographically that I don't, we don't have the psychology. We don't have the neurochemistry for what we got now. What's coming is, it's going to be rough. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think we're seeing pornography addiction is skyrocketing. The realest, the scary statistic of that is about 5% of men under the age of 30 used to have erectile dysfunction. Now, about 30% of men under the age of 30 have erectile dysfunction. And it's probably due to pornography or almost certainly due to pornography usage.

So the use is skyrocketing. And I think that what a lot of people miss about that, so a lot of people think that pornography addiction is about sex. Yeah. But it really isn't. So the number of people, when you sit down and work with these people, there's a lot of like passive pornography consumption. so people will be like working on Excel on one monitor and there'll be like pornography on the other monitor for hours at a time.

So people don't realize what it kind of really is doing. And in order to understand what it does, we have to understand that, you know, the way that our organism is designed, it's to be able to procreate and then support our offspring so that they can procreate, right? So if you sort of think about it,

like the prime reason to exist as a person is to engage in a sexual act. Like, that's what it's all about. Because if we stop doing that, no more kids. Yeah, we're done. Right. So.

We're working to get there. So birth rates are on the decline. And so what happens is sexual activity has a really interesting effect on the brain, which is that it shuts everything else off. So especially in men, and this is a little bit different from men and women. But if you kind of think about, you know, there are lots of jokes about, you know, when a dude feels frisky. You know, I know you're married, I'm married.

When we feel frisky, it's easy to ignore a lot of other stuff. And then if you look at the physiology and neuroscience of the sexual act, when we're engaged in that act, we're not feeling anxious. We're not afraid. Unless the anxiety is so overpowering that we are not able to engage in the act, which absolutely happens. But generally speaking, it shuts down all of our negative emotional circuitry. So we can say, with neuroscientific accuracy, he probably really didn't see the dishes.

Right. Absolutely. Or it doesn't see the pile of clothes in the corner. But here's something really interesting. So 58% of women say that one of the top three things that increase their libido and desire for sex is men helping out your housework. And cognitive duties like doing shopping and stuff like that. That's 58% of people say top three, one. Trust, safety, and helping out with housework.

That's the real foreplay. Yeah. But, yeah, so basically the way pornography works is that, you know, if I'm feeling bad, there's just so much powerful circuitry to make those emotions go away. So I think the number one thing is about emotion management. And so then what we're starting to see is that, you know, I was, I remember earlier when you said, like, the smoke detector was, the alarm was going off. But, you know, if I were to ask you, why didn't you deal with whatever was on fire? Like, what was your experience then? Like, so you started medication, then that started, you know, started a path.

Maybe you were on it for a little while. But why weren't you able to fix the problem before that? So in my particular life, I, a lot of these things that my body was saying, hey, you're not safe. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, trying to get my attention were actually things that were what I would call socially norm. Okay. It's normal just to look at pornography. It's normal to, me, that's just my wife. It's normal to have six figures in student loans and a mortgage you can't afford in two house, like two car notes. It's normal to always worry if you're about to get fired because you and your boss are cross. And so all these things that everyone's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, my body's saying, hey, you're not okay. Like, we're not safe here. Yeah, yeah. And so I didn't even know that those were fires. Okay. And so when I went looking, for hey what's wrong with me and you walk in and see the first the first just out of grad school and again i'm talking i'm talking negative about my own community the first just out of grad school just got their lPC or their lMSW and you you on a chart have a set of symptom clusters for

six months then i can tag you oh you have a your brain's malfunctioning instead of saying no no your brain's working perfectly let's look at your environment here right let's start looking through what's on fire. I didn't even know that there was a fire. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So, so I think it, you know, being well adjusted to an unhealthy society doesn't make you healthy. That's it. Right. So you're normal. It's normal, but it sure is hell ain't healthy. Exactly. You know. And so I think what, what I see is something really similar with people who struggle with pornography is there's a lot of stuff going on in their life where there are two conditions. One is they don't know it's a problem, right? So, so men There's an interesting phenomenon called normative male alexothymia.

Yeah. So normative means it's normal. Yeah. Male means it happens to men. And alexothymia means color blindness to your emotional state. Right. So we're actually conditioned. Some of it is biological, hormonal.

But we're actually conditioned to suppress our feelings. So we don't even know when there are fires going on, right? Right. Everything in your life is burning down around you and you're just numb to it. Yeah. Just because you're numb, right? So let's be clear about the term numb. So if you go to the dentist and you get numbed up and they remove your tooth, just because

you don't feel your tooth being removed doesn't mean that there isn't damage taking place. Oh, it's a five-alarm fire to your body. Absolutely, right? So this is what really a lot of people don't understand is just because you feel emotions does not mean that emotions are not active within you. They're actually turned on, but you've got lydicane in there so you don't feel. them and they are controlling your behavior. Golly, yeah.

Right? So there's a lot of numbness, but there are fires going on just like in your case. The second thing that I think is almost sadder is that many of the men that I work with have problems in their life that they feel like are unsolvable. So when you can't solve a problem, right? So when I'm working with couples where the wife does discover pornography, you know, I recently was working with someone who basically went through a divorce and their pornography, you said a huge part of it. And this person, unfortunately, we weren't able to help them in time, like things were too bad.

And so the divorce proceeded. But over time, you know, what we discovered is that there are all kinds of problems they have in their life. They don't know how to communicate these with their wife. And since they don't know how to communicate, you know, the wife is like, well, why are you doing this? Can you please stop? It's making me feel X, Y, Z. And they, And they don't even know, you know, they feel so powerless to actually fix these things because now your wife is upset with you. You don't know how to make her happy. You try to stop pornography for a little while, but that fuel is still burning, right? Those emotions are still active. And then you don't really have anything to deal with any alternate coping mechanisms that are healthier.

So there's an immense feeling of powerlessness. And so if you feel, if you're a dude out there or woman, and, you know, you're a dude out there or woman. and you have a problem with pornography. The most important question to ask yourself. Because everyone thinks it's like, oh, you're a sexual fetish, whatever. It's not, is there something in your life that you feel is unsolvable? And really working on that problem, really starting to feel empowered, right? So a lot of addiction treatment is about, I can't win against the alcohol.

But if you go to an alcoholic's anonymous, meeting, there's something really beautiful about, hi, my name is Alok and I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober for 30 years and I'm an alcoholic. It's kind of this weird paradoxical empowerment where you start with, I can't control this, fingers crossed, I'm going to do the best that I can. Which is a tiny reclamation of autonomy. A hundred percent. I don't think it's tiny. I think it's huge, right, to admit that you were not perfect. And once you admit, right, and we're parents, and hopefully you've got parents listening to this, like, once you acknowledge that there's a problem, right? Like, if you've got kids who are struggling in school or going through a breakup or something and, like, if your kid comes to you, how do I make sure that my ex starts dating me again?

Yeah, yeah. You know, you got to say, hey, there's nothing you can do to guarantee that outcome. Yeah. But there's a lot of stuff that we can do, right? So I think that empowerment becomes really important for addiction. It's letting your hands open up. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

then you can be about solving the problem so it's the one of the hardest things for me is to communicate to let's just take i'm just going to take a generic wife who finds pornography on generic husband's computer yeah this deeply personal like i feel like he's cheating that's in a fair yeah yeah yeah that deeply personal wound and if you said if it it is right all those things are real and And it's hard to say, but probably that's not about you, is a hard truth to metabolize. 100%. This super big pain, you just stuck a knife in the middle of my chest, and you're telling me that's not about me. And it's hard to compassionately say that usually is a man who's drowning in front of you.

Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So I think there's like two sides of this coin, right? Yeah, yeah. So absolutely that a lot of men will use pornography. feet of cope. A lot of men, because it's such a powerful, it's like the most endogenous drug we have. It's produced by our body, right? It's like you don't need to actually even take a substance, but it activates your brain in the same way. It gives you dopamine. Yeah,

lights you up. Yeah. Shuts off your negative emotions, right? So anything that we get addicted to, there are two things to look for. One is it gives us pleasure, and the second is it takes away pain. Right. And then we become dependent on it. But I think there's a couple of other angles to this. so a lot of the women that I work with who, you know, have male partners who struggle with pornography, there's an intense amount of insecurity. Right? Because it's like, what are you getting from this? I'm not providing you. What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me, right? And there's a very real threat. Yeah, of course. Right. So is this because like it starts with pornography, but then like what comes next? Right. And part of that pain is not. not just the discovery, right? Part of the pain of the discovery is also the fact that there was a discovery, the fact that this is hidden.

There's secrets. There's secrets, right? So if this is something, so I think a lot of those warning signs, I think, are completely understandable. And I'm not saying, I get that you're saying that they're understandable too, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think, like, you know, there's a lot of insecurity. There's a lot of concern about, you know, doing something behind my back.

The hardest conversation that I've had to navigate with a patient is how to communicate your sexual needs and desires to your partner. So a couple years ago, I was doing a marriage retreat, and this was a joke. I was being silly. I said, I've created a new thing. It's called the John Deloney Erotic Envelope System. Here's what I want you to do.

Go to Walgreens and get a 99-10 envelope, and you write down five things, you want to see or try, and you, and just once a month, once every two weeks, one of you all draw it out and just promise, you'll give it the college try, and if you don't even know how this is physiologically possible, you won't go, your first thing won't be,

be that's sick. Your first thing will be, I don't even understand that. Tell me about that. And bro, the number of people have come back and be like, can we buy that? But it has nothing to do with the act. It has to do with there's a thing inside of me and I don't know how to share this. And I don't know how to receive this thing. Beautiful. Right. So and let's like, let's dig into that for a second, right? Because this is like, if we think about the most private parts of ourselves, right, that there's so much intimacy. Yes. And so you have one person, if you're married, let's just assume that we've got a married couple, right? So, like, you've got one person in the world who's got your back in every single way.

But if there's some part of you, you want them to do something. Yeah. And then you share that with them because many of them don't know how it's physiologically possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or they don't know how to start going about doing that. We'll talk about female examples in a second. That rejection, the risk of that rejection. Boom, off ramp.

Right? Yeah, absolutely. That's going to crack this intimacy. So we've got a good. Good thing going, right? We're in love. It's good. We've got a couple of kids.

But let's just like, we've made humans together. We've buried parents together. We have gone through job loss and job gain together. We've celebrated. Oh, yeah. We have so much. But there's, except this. Yeah, but there's a huge difference between everything that you just said and this, which is

all of those things is me and you against that thing out there. But when it comes to something like, this is me and you. And so this, the tension, the tension. The tension is between the two of us, right? That's why it's such a critical fracture. And I don't want to risk because, hey, like you said, this is what's so paradoxical about it. We've been through so much stuff together. And would I ever risk that?

But this is between us. Yeah. So there's some distance. And in this equilibrium, we can bury parents. We can raise children. We're connected right now. There's nothing between us, right? We're going to just, I'm going to shove it to the back and you're going to shove your stuff to

back and we're going to stay good between us. And that's how we handle all the difficulties of life. Why would I ever want to jeopardize raising kids, burying parents, paying off mortgages, dealing with cancer by creating this friction? What if there's a rejection over here? Because this is something you can't take away. So it's almost, it's the old adage like women connect. And again, I know this is overgeneralized, but women connect kneecap to kneecap, and men connect shoulder to shoulder. We're doing a thing. It's us verse,

or we're solving a problem this way. And in a marriage, yeah, we can get shoulder to shoulder and take stuff on, but the moment we turn, man. Yeah, so I think it's tricky, right? That's terrifying.

Because even if I share with you and you say no, that's not the end of it. Right. Because then how does that rejection make me feel? And even if I say, if we pretend everything is okay,

and then you say no, which is totally fine, but then are you wondering whether I think that's okay. Am I just saying it's okay? But I really don't think it's okay. Was it about me that she just rejected or he just reject it? Absolutely.

So I think this is what's really important is people don't realize how to, it's not about opening the conversation. People don't know how to navigate that conversation to a healthy close, right? Whether it involves trying things or not. There's so much that we don't know how to talk about because this is the one kind of conversation that no one ever teaches us how to have. Right? About intimacy. Yep. And the funny thing about this is like a lot of people will think like, oh, you know, dudes want their wives to do particular things, but it goes both ways. Of course. And I think that oftentimes the men that I work

with, you know, and I've had my wife complain about this to me. And by the way, my wife says you were awesome. I was supposed to give you this. I received that, dude. Thanks for you. Because of the way that you talk about your relationship and she absolutely loves it. Well. Tell her I think she's awesome. We'll do. So, so, I forgot what I was saying. Oh, yeah. So, you know, a lot of times we as men don't know how to provide the right level of romance that you find in a romance novel.

Right. Right. And our partners don't know how to ask that of us. So they'll say, like, I want you to be more romantic, right? But then we look at the cover of this romance novel where there's some like, you know, pirate. Yeah, on a horse. Pirate on a horse.

With no shirt. Yeah, right? And so similarly, there's a lot of stuff that our wives may be wanting us to do that they don't know how to ask for. That is also intimate. It's something between the two of us. But we're like, we can't live up. So we can't live up to the washboard ab pirate riding a horse.

And they can't live up to the pornographic actress. Whereas the beautiful thing is you don't have to live up to those two things. The reality of it is great, you know? And so I think there's a lot of, like, romance that we don't know how to do. We think it's flowers and chocolates and that's it. But there's so much more to it. There's tension, there's connection, there's excitement, you know, there's a lot of... The transformation of my own marriage came from what I would call the de-Hollywoodization.

Mm-hmm. The, when, when going back to like, I just need some more romance to now, my wife came in, and I've told this story before on the show. Like, she came in about a year ago and just pointed at me and said, I need to borrow your nervous system for 20 minutes. Find an episode of Brooklyn Nine and I'll be right back. And I was sitting on the couch doing something mindless. I found an episode and she curled up on me like a golden retreat.

I just curled up tight. We watched the show. We laughed. And she literally she got up and she goes, thank you. As though saying exactly what I need, instead of saying just romance, Hollywood would say, if you have to explain it, it's not real anymore your relationship's over. Oh, yes. And instead of saying, hey, this is exactly what I need in this moment. I just need to lean up against something starting for a bit.

Brilliant. And also, me being like, hey, you want to try, like, I need you to read my mind. And if you can't read my mind, then we're done. Then Hollywood says then somebody else is going to be able to read your mind instead of saying, hey, I really, ooh, it's uncomfortable. I want to try this, this, and this. Which is scary. It's terrifying. And that's where the magic is, right?

Yeah. So I think what people don't get about de-holy, and I love this term de-Hollywoodization, you know, we have these ideas of what relationships are. And especially when it comes to things like pornography, when it comes to things like social media, right, where we have all these performative relationships. where we have influencers who are showing, oh, my partner did this for me. And people are, I really think a lot of this stuff really pollutes our idea

of what a real relationship is. And oftentimes what happens is, you know, if your partner is watching something, whether it's a Hollywood movie, an influencer or pornography, it can feel like you can't match that. Yes.

Right? So there's a lot of sense of like, I can't live up to these expectations. Absolutely. I can't live up to these expectations. One thing you got to remember, member is that you have certain things at your disposal that they can't match. And your example is great. It's actual physical touch. Yeah. Yeah. You know, when you touch a human being, when you actually,

there's like what you see when you kiss, when you see two people kissing, and then there's the actual experience of kissing. So you have so much ammo that Hollywood can't touch, which is real experience. It's real. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Which is actually holding your partner, which is, which is cracking a joke, you know. and not all sex has to be passionate. Exactly. But you've got two young kids. There's survival sex. Absolutely.

We've got seven minutes. Absolutely, right? I'm in if you're in, right? Yeah, and then there's the, why don't we do that more off? Exactly, yes, exactly. So I think there's a lot of like, you know, shared emotional connection. There's a lot of intimacy that you can build. There's a lot of shoulder to shoulder and knee to kind of going on.

And so I think a lot of the problems that we see is that, and this is one of the reasons that, I think we have like this dating and mating crisis right now, which is that everyone is trying to live up to expectations, and I think apps are just making this worse. Oh, yeah, catastrophically so, yeah. Apps are basically saying, give us all your expectations. We will find you someone who checks all the boxes,

but that's not what a real relationship is. Which is, by the way, is kind of a through a glass darkly version of yourself. What does that mean, glass darkly version? Means when I fill out all the things I like, I'm going to get a version of that back to me, And so we're going to have three great dates and then I'm going to get bored. I'm going to have no

there is no reciprocation. I listen to punk rock music. My wife grew up on country music. I've benefited and so is she. Absolutely. So I think that's what's so scary is what you're talking about

is that apps will select for things that have nothing to do. There's tons of research on this. Have nothing to do with relationship quality. Exactly. It has to do with What you think is cool. Absolutely, right?

Which is not good relationship down the road. Yeah, so I'm the same way. So, you know, my wife and I had a conversation recently where, like, she wants me to, like, do more things that she likes. We're, like, completely different human beings. We don't like the same music. We have different interests. Like, I'm a gamer.

She's super into tennis. Right? And we're, like, completely different people. And we would have never met on a dating app. This is kind of funny. The one thing we have in common, she's Indian. I'm Indian. The one thing we have in common is we both.

both didn't want to end up with an Indian person. That's the only thing. That's the only thing we have in common when it comes to, like, our shared preferences for relationships. And if you look at the science of it, you know, sharing interests is not even in the top five of a successful relationship. No. You know, it's really wild. The hardest part is if I could go back and tell 24-year-old me is the things you're the most worried about when it comes to shared interest will be the thing that make your life as, rich as it possibly can be later on.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. And, yeah, but it's hard. I don't know how to, I don't know how to explain that to 25-year-old me because that guy wouldn't listen to anybody, right? And it's something you have to endure. And I guess the challenge is getting into the minds of folks that the greatest gift you can give your partner is some sort of map.

And that map is like, here's how you can love me right now. Or here is a... Let me ask if this passes your smell test and feel free to say, absolutely not. I have a working hypothesis that may not be accurate. In fact, you're the first clinician I've talked to about this. Tell me if I'm wrong. I think we way overuse the word needs, especially in mental health culture, and a much more intimate and even vulnerable thing to put on the table is what I want.

So if I tell you, I need X, Y, or Z. I need you to help around here. I need this type of sex right now. What I'm doing is I'm taking a cinder block and I'm handing my well-being to you and saying you have to fix this for me. That's a whom, that's a weight. And that goes on a checklist

because you know what else needs to be done, the kid's got to be fed, the diaper's got to be changed, the yard's got to be mowed, the roof's got to be fixed. It goes on this list. It's a scarier thing for me to say, I want you.

Or I want a high, right now because then someone could say no if someone gives you a need you kind of have you kind of get railroaded in yeah so so so is that past a smell test or no it's it absolutely passes the smell test but it it i i agree 100 percent and i'm it triggers me because i think this is one of the worst things that's happening right now okay so i completely agree that we use needs way too much and we don't use wants enough um i think some of the other some of the that foundation i agree with 100% where you go from there i go in a far more negative place okay take me so so i'm not disagreeing with even where you end up but like what i've noticed

is scary so when you start saying you need particular things this is the way for a spoiled person to get what they want yes yes it's a weaponization yes right so i say like i need i need i need i need this purse. Yes. So it's really scary and you're spot on that like this is, there's something weird happening where we're starting to use a lot of mental health language very colloquially. Yes. And I think it, what's really scary is that, you know, there are people out there that,

and it's kind of human nature who will hijack the word need. Yes. And really start to create. And even when I work with these people, like it kind of makes me angry, but I sort of see where they're coming from because they, many times they don't know. know how to manage that on their own. So it becomes a need. Okay, that's fair. That's a good call.

A great example of this is... I need my spouse to regulate me because I literally don't know how. Absolutely, right? So you took the example out of my mouth. That's actually a fair, that's a valid challenge. The really scary example of this is, I need you to not break up with me, otherwise I'm going to kill myself. Yep. Yeah. Right. And so this creates a really, and maybe that is more of a need because we're talking

about life and death. Yeah. But what we're seeing a lot of is a lot of people, when they want something, their inability to tolerate not getting what they want is so low that they convert it to a need. Yes. Or they have discovered that the way to get what I want is to call it a need. It's to throw a cinder block at you and say catch. Absolutely, right?

And it feels so burdensome. Yeah. I love this imagery of a cinder block, right? Because when I'm sharing all my needs, needs with you, I'm absolutely outsourcing that responsibility to you. And so I think it's like it's really, really dangerous. It's, it, well, it, it causes so much, the question I get from men all the time is how do I get my wife to want to want to be with me, right? And every time I've had an audience, like a live audience, and I've said, when's the last time you told your wife, not that I need

sex today or which which by the way can be a threat too or i'm not to go get it somewhere else either through pornography or through the person i work with whatever when's the last time you looked at her after helping around the house like taking your fair share of the load at the house and saying hey i really want you in the whole room just goes who right and get you off the need to do list into the, right? Similar with if you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't, and he never gives me emotional connection. It's like, are you a person that he can emotionally connect to?

Because the emotional interactions you'll have are all about how he's not enough, he's not enough, he's not doing this, he's not doing this, are you a person that he can actually plug into? And that comes, like, for me it always comes back to, if you need to use the word need to get what you want, then your relationship is, not built on the foundation you think it's on yeah it's it's it's a dangerous game if you say i want you

and they say no that's a revealing that that tells you where your relationship is right yeah and um but but i but your your critique is fair and that if i don't know how to do that then it it it is a need right yeah yeah so it's a need absolutely right so that's what we see with people who have like borderline personality disorder and stuff like that right so you have all these intense feelings that and i I think it's everything you said and the things that I said, right? Sometimes it's, I don't know how to get this done without you, which is why I need you to do it. And the real challenge with that is that it engenders dependence, right? And what's starting to happen is now when I'm giving you this cinder block, you have cinder blocks too.

You have your own cinder blocks. And oftentimes you're carrying your own cinder blocks and now you're carrying my cinder blocks, too. And that is something that is can work in the short term, but is absolutely going to weigh you down long term. Absolutely, yeah. One thing I wanted to touch on is this question of how to want. So I've devoted myself to this in the last year or two. Okay, sweet. How do I get my wife to want to want me?

Yeah, yeah. Okay. And I'm not saying that from like my marriage perspective. I did go through somewhat of a midlife crisis. Yeah. We all have. Yeah. We've all been there. I think we don't advertise. One thing that we should let people know more is that midlife crises, I think, are developmentally appropriate. I think they just happen. They should happen. And it's part of growing up. But when it, so a couple of questions that, you know, I work with when I work with someone, I'll ask someone, when was the last time that they wanted you? And what were the conditions during that time? Yeah. Right. So what we need to understand is desire is something that grows. It's not something that you turn on or turn off. And,

you kind of talk about emotional connection, so I'm not surprised at all that we basically ended up in a very similar place. But oftentimes what happens is, you know, early on in relationships, there's a lot of space for desire. There's a lot of space for emotional connection. And then we get mortgages and then we get kids and we get all these kinds of things. And as we start entering the early stages of burnout, the first thing that goes from a neuroscience perspective is empathy. And once empathy goes away, once you're not sleeping well and once empathy goes away, I'm sure you've seen this. a ton and maybe live through it, right? But when you have young kids at home and things like that, and sex life gets really challenging. And then it becomes a desperate, we've got seven minutes, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but I think a big part of it is, is understanding that there are certain circumstances that create, that we didn't have to engineer before. Right. Because they were natural and organic. We could emotionally connect because we had a lot of idle time. Yes. And so what we really have to do once we get that time crunches we have to understand okay what was the fertilizer at that time or what was the ground like at that time and now we need to add fertilizer now we need to add something

special that wasn't there before intentionality intentionality right you have to really think about it and i i think um trust safety sleep i think is huge yeah right and i think it's just understanding that that the there is some i think this stuff gets overplayed a little bit but there's absolutely like a physiological element where the sexual act for the male biology is different from the sexual act from a female biology. The energy investment for male biology is like actually average is about seven minutes. The energy investment for a female bio. Half the audience was just like, seven minutes.

Oh, yes. So this is fascinating. People don't realize this. Average sexual act is three to nine minutes. Yeah. 50% of women. would prefer that sex stays less than 15 minutes. And this is where a lot of people will be like,

that means you're not doing it right. Well, like, sometimes that's not the case. Well, and that's where, again, pornography has taken any sort of reality. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I once had, if I can tell a slightly vulgar story, you all can edit out. But I once had a patient who came to my office and said,

you know, I'm having difficulty. I can't achieve a full. climax. And so we kind of worked at it for a little while and, and, you know, I was trying to ask some questions and things like that. And then finally, like the second week they came in, I said, you know, let's just get to basics here. When you say full climax, what do you mean? And they had this impression from pornography that when, like, the volume of climax is like, you know, gallops. Sure, yeah, yeah. And they were achieving climax. But in the pornography, they watched it. It didn't look like the, The volume was different, right?

The volume was like three milliliters. And they thought they were broken. Three millimeters. They thought they were broken. And their climax lasts a certain amount of time, which is not what is demonstrated in pornography. Right, right. So, anyway, that's just. It was just out there.

Yeah, yeah. People just don't understand, right, what normal really is. So my, if I was to distill it down and make it as simple as I can, and again, tell me if I'm out to lunch here. Again, a broad generalization inside of a bell curve, right? Everyone's different, listening to this, but it is, for all of human history, sex has been an extraordinarily vulnerable act, especially for women, carrying the bulk of this might kill you in childbirth. Most dangerous thing you'll do statistically. If you have a child, it's yours forever, right? And he can leave and you can't, right?

And so I have to know you are safe, you will be here. There is some sort of, and I'm going to get through that safety emotionally to get to this. and coming this other direction, if before we were sitting upstairs in the green room talking and you were like, hey man, can I just tell you like, life's like really tough for me right now. It just guide a guy,

I'd be like, cool man, right? We have to know, like physically, we did a thing together. We have shared professional interest. We, if I come in vulnerable with a guy just out in the world, It's going to get me ostracized. And so we're going to do a thing together, which thing gives me permission to be emotionally vulnerable with you. And we cross each other.

Does that make sense? Am I saying that clearly? Yeah. It's emotional to physical versus physical allows emotion. And emotion allows physical. And we go right past each other. So I think a lot of – so are you – so I don't disagree with you at all. I would add some of just my experience working with men.

So I think what a lot of men struggle with in terms of emotional vulnerability is they literally do not know how to be emotionally vulnerable. And oftentimes what a lot of people think by that is, oh, yeah, men can't cry. That's actually, it's really fascinating. So many men, including men in like happy marriages, right? So when I say, if we were back in the green room and I was like, hey, John, my life is, I'm on the struggle bus right now, right? It may get me ostracized. What a lot of people don't realize is that when men are emotionally vulnerable with their female partners, they get ostracized by their female partners. Correct.

So this is really, there's some fascinating research that comes out of actually a feminist publication, which is really interesting. So oftentimes as men, as we express emotions. So if you look at the way that women express emotions, and this is once again, bell curve, right? So there's kind of this gradual escalation, right, where they'll talk for, let's say, let's say, say like a 45-minute period, you don't start with crying. You go from like zero to five miles an hour. Your female friend tells you, okay, like, I totally understand. They're like very emotionally supportive and they'll kind of work their way up in a very like safe, collaborative way. Yeah. So as men, we have like two modes. We have like zero and we have 100%.

And what's really scary nowadays, the kids call it the ick. But so many men that I work with, when they express emotional vulnerability to their female partner, their female partner gets the ick. Okay. And that's for a couple of really interesting reasons. One is we don't know how to go from zero to 25 and make sure you're okay with 25, right?

Hey, we cool? Yeah, yeah. Right, so it goes from zero to 100. Yeah. And then there's another really interesting thing. So there's a kind of emotional labor that men are actually really good at, that women are not socialized to do nearly as much,

which is something called, emotional containment. Okay. So if I go from zero to 100, you would be able to handle that. Of course. Right? So we've all had probably male friends who will just absolutely be out of control and we're like, bro, it's okay.

Right, right. I can hold that. You can be falling apart and like it's like I can handle that. Yeah. So even I remember when my dad passed away, the way that, you know, when someone cries they end up on a man's shoulder. Right, right, right, right. Right.

So I, as a psychiatrist, have held people who are crying on my couch. I cannot think of a single of my female colleagues who has ever done that. Right, so the ability to hold emotions and contain them, right? Because we're really good at suppressing. So you can send it my way.

I'll hold it for you. I can hang on to it for you. I can suppress it. I'll shove it down. Like, I know how to bury that. Like, I'm good at that. Yeah. And oftentimes women don't do that kind of emotional labor nearly as much as men do.

That's our day in and day out. So what can actually happen is if you're a dude and you go from zero to 100, that is oftentimes too much for someone to handle, right? Especially your female partner. And it kind of gives them the ick. I hear this a lot with, like, dating where, you know, now, like, men are trying to be a little bit more emotionally vulnerable and stuff like that. And just think about it, right? if you're a woman listening to this, if your,

if your husband showed up and just started crying at like 100%, and did that like six days in a row, right? Right. How would that make you feel? Would you be like, is this okay? I don't know what the fuck is going on.

Like, let's go, let's go. I don't know how to handle it. Yeah. And that's also why one of the worst things I think you can ever do is confess your love. Huh. So when you confess your love,

you're going, you've had all this love that's been piling up. Oh, and you're confessing. So I'm following. more and more and more and more and more in love. And then I suddenly dump all of that on you. So I go from zero to 100. The other person is like, where is this coming from?

Oh, yeah. And if you think about the way that organic, I don't know what happened with you and your relationship, but I would guess that most people out there, even if you kind of go from zero to 100, you don't show them zero to 100, right? You fall for them real quick in the back of your mind. You can't get them out of your head.

But you're kind of playing it cool. And there's this graduated. I was going to say the old line was, dude, be cool. Yeah, right? Exactly. And there are reasons why these things are the old line, right? So there are reasons that we offer this kind of advice. Yeah. Because if you go from zero to 100 and the other person can't handle it, they're going to pull away. You're going to bury them. Huh. Dude, we can talk for five hours on this one topic. We need to set that up. Next time I'm in Houston. We're going to get together.

All right, I want to switch gears. I need your parenting coaching me now. Okay. We're going to televise this, but I are going to record it, but I'm literally. really asking for your input. Okay, okay, okay. You are a gamer. Okay. Like, right? You're like, you're like, yeah, yeah, you're like, an outstanding gamer from what I understand. Like, you're good at it. I'm a gamer. Okay. Okay. So I have hit the bell, the, the, the, the pendulum so far that I have, in the words of, uh, the great Homer Simpson, the best part about having kids is to teach them to hate the things that you hate, right? So I have passed along to my son, I'll use him, he's 15, this over sensationalized danger of all things

screens, all things like whatever, go outside, go be active. In fact, I got him a new climbing stand for we're in the middle of hunting season here in Nashville and he was this morning before the sun came up practicing with it up a tree, right? Okay. Hit it so far. And I also have begun to have, Like he got his first smartphone in eighth grade, but we took off cameras. We took off the internet. There's no way, it's basically a texting device, right? Okay. And to this day, 15 still doesn't have that stuff.

No Snapchat, no, none of those things. Part of that is a response to me doing a bunch of sexual assault investigations where everything was in Snapchat over and over and over and over again, right? And just constantly living in the data about social media. Have I hit, am I, have I gone too far to the point I'm messing this port? kid up playing defense and if i haven't yet what is a way that he's he's not two and a half years from walking out of my front door into the wild wild west okay how would i begin to integrate into him responsibility while at the same time saying you're still kid man and these these the tech ecosystem is simply better than us it's it's better than us help me okay sure so let's start with a

couple of questions. Okay. What happens next? Like, where is your plan going to lead you? Like, so what happens next? Well, it's, plan is a, a, so a couple years ago, he's got, he does have some video games and he plays them with his friends. And that was, he brought it to us and said, hey, we live out here in the country. When I walk out of my schoolhouse, you have isolated me from every human being on the planet. I was like, that's actually, that's a fair call. And so if there's a couple of these games that have closed groups that I know what I don't want a stranger's coming in

et cetera, et cetera. It's a tonne extra work on my part but he was a fair call. So you gotta be able to talk to your friends on the phone and just talk noise and trash and make jokes after school and whatever. That's fine.

And if y'all are doing it playing Minecraft, so be it. But I have to come up with some sort of healthy integration because the day you walk out of my house, that's the ecosystem you're in. Okay, so right. So I think, I think,

so it sounds like y'all hunt. Let me say, With a bow and arrow, there has been, since he was a very young kid, here's what safety looks like. And you can be next to me, and you can't touch this thing. And then now he's 15. Okay. And you can climb up a tree on your own, right? Because I, I, so there's trust there. You all hunt? Yes, correct. Okay. And you use guns or bows and arrows? Both. Okay. How old was he when you taught him how to use a rifle? How old was he when you taught him how to use a rifle? I thought him that very, very young. But there's a difference between teaching you, how to you, and then you being able to do this on your own.

I'm with you. I'm with you. Yeah, very, very, very young. How old was he? Gosh, man, probably five. Okay. Four. Right? So some people will think, I can understand that people will judge that.

I don't judge that at all. Right? So I think here's kind of, and I'm kind of with you. I think this is a really common problem. That's why I literally wrote a book about it. It's called How to Raise a Healthy Gamer where I kind of lay all this stuff out. So I play games with my kids. Yep.

I tried to play Mario Kart with my daughter when she was. too. She was way too young, didn't understand it. So here's kind of where I'm coming from. So let's like just super high level. You mentioned that these tech platforms are better than us. Better than us. Yeah. We're outgunned. We have, we have certain things that they don't have, but we have the off button. Oh, we always have the nuclear option. No, no, no, that's not the new. No, No, the off button doesn't help us so much. Okay, okay. No, that feels good.

So, so, so off button leads to deception. Okay. Okay. So if, if you are pushing the off button on your kid, your kid is just going to learn ways around it, right? Correct, yeah. So, so I think we're outgunned for sure. Parents don't know what to do.

That's why I wrote a book about it. So let's start with a couple of things. So I think that technology is going to get more addictive every year that goes by. So we had, you know, even, even, when I started working on tech addiction, which is in 2015, things were not that bad. Now we're in the world of AI and everything is just getting, the rate of change is increasing. It's everything is getting advancing faster, right? So it's my view that we have to prepare our kids for the world that they are going to inherit. Correct. So I'm kind of with you that if you want to teach your kid how to

hunt, you got to teach them early and you got to teach them responsibility. Right. Right. So And when it comes to the gun, I think this is a great analogy. I had to model every second of that. Yeah. Because that's what he's absorbing. Yeah. So that's... How does dad handle this bow and arrow every second of every day?

So that's another challenge that parents have. You can't model Minecraft. No. Right? That's right. So like that's really challenging, right? So even with gun safety, like you can model it. He can learn how to chop carrots.

He can learn how to shoot a gun. can learn about safety. He's going to watch how careful you are and he's going to pick it up. But a lot of parents aren't gamers. And so how are you supposed to model good behavior? Can you model laughter and joy and an exuberant life away from a screen? Absolutely. You should.

Is that an antidote? That is not an antidote. Okay. So this is where I think this is the wrong kind of thinking in my opinion. Right? So it's not either or. And you're thinking about it like a pendulum. I am.

Yeah. This is not either or. So we got a like. If I was coaching you, I would start with what's your allergy to screen? Why do you hate screen so much? Because it, because I can't stop. When I turn it on, I go do a vortex. Okay.

Does that make sense? Absolutely. I have a lived experience of never having social media and three years ago finding myself in my closet scrolling while I was like, I remember laughing like, oh, dude, they got me. Yeah. So, I mean, I literally, oh, well, I, it. failed so many classes. It took five and a half years to graduate from college because I basically failed my first two years of college because I was playing video games for 16 to 20 hours a day.

So like think about that. You're a therapist, right? So you're a counselor. Right. So like this is your struggle. This is your demon. Dumping on him to carry a kid. And it's like, oh my God. You know, I've seen this. You're, you know, I had a kid with someone, the person who the father of the kid turned out to be not the best human being on the planet. Therefore, I never want you to date. All men are bad. All men are bad. That's right, yeah. Right?

So that's kind of what you're doing emotionally. Yes. That needs to be worked on because that emotion is going to be very confusing for him when you're coming out of him like that. Yeah. Right. And I think you've done a really good job because you're still letting him play and you haven't, you know, so you acknowledge that this is his world.

And so you're doing good there. But I think working on that is important. It is, man. Well, and also, it may be the only lifeline I have in three years is, hey, you don't get online and play a game together because he's across the country. Yeah. And that could be a shared moment we have. Absolutely, right?

So I think even sharing with him why you come at him so hard about screens, this is what I noticed in myself. It's something that I struggled with. It's something that I wanted to protect you from. I was afraid that this is going to mess you up. Right. So having that conversation with him, giving him that context will help immensely. Okay. Yes.

Can I ask a question then? Yeah. Going back to the pseudo-relationship of social media. Okay. One of the things since he was little, I would always ask, like, why would you outsource playing a baseball game to the screen? Why don't we just go outside and play baseball? Is this a, or why go shoot bad guys out here? Let's go Nerf gun in the yard.

Is this an off-shoot? Is it a substitute of an activity? No, I don't think so. Of an activity? So why play baseball? on a game instead of playing baseball in real life because I can be awesome in the game

and I'm going to be medium. No, you can't. No, no, I'm saying I can be awesome I can be really tough on social media right? Yeah, so so let's let's tease these apart okay so first thing is for you specifically. I know I'm wrong here

I'm hanging on. No, no, you're not wrong okay you're not wrong about anything yeah you have the beliefs that you have, you have the experiences that you have, you're, you're incredibly thoughtful. Yeah. You're a good dad. You've lived through some difficult time. So you're not wrong.

What I would say is you're incomplete. Perfect. Love it. Right. That was a loving way to say that. I mean, it's not like, I'm not trying to like glaze on you and be like artificially compassionate. It's like this is how parents get here.

There's just dimensions of this stuff that we don't understand. Yes. And honestly, you asked me my core fear, I don't understand it. Absolutely. I don't get it. Right. And so this is why when men have problems that they don't know how to solve, right? We had a whole conversation about how we react to that.

We shut it down. We shut it down. We shut it down. And sometimes we use pornography. Sounds like that's not your challenge. So let's just start with. So I think understanding your own feelings. Because once again, your child is going to model, they're going to pick up on what you're doing.

That's right. Let's remember that when you're saying, when you're saying, son was like 11 months old, he had no ability to communicate with you with words. You had no ability to communicate with him with words. The vital survival communication between parent and child is completely nonverbal. He knows how you're feeling. My favorite study of this is if you take a parent with anxiety disorder and a child with anxiety disorder, if you give the parent treatment, the child's anxiety will improve, even if you don't do anything of this kid. Yeah. Okay? So he is picking up whatever you were feeling. Now, so that's the first thing. So you got to understand how

you feel about it. Maybe have a conversation with him. He's 15. So you can probably do that. Oh, we're way past yeah. Yeah, he's great. I think the second thing is, is, you know, I'm a big fan of teach him how to swim. Don't keep him out of the ocean. Exactly. I am too. Right. So how do we do that? So this is where I think the key thing is absolutely integration, but with awareness. So what a lot of parents do is it's either off or on. But that's not how people will ask me, like, how many hours a day is too much. It's not about how many hours a day, right? So if we think about, like, I'm trying to think of a good example. So even if we take someone who, like, works, right, how many hours of a day is work okay?

And you may say, okay, 40 hours a week. Like, I work 80 hours a week, 90 hours a week. I work six or seven days out of the week. You know, and that's not unhealthy, right? So it's not a total number. It is the way that you are handling it. Right. Okay.

So I think it's about teaching them responsible. And the cornerstone of responsibility is awareness. So this is what I did with my kids. They would wake up in the morning and they would say, can we watch TV? Right. Okay, Saturday morning. And I would say- My daughter starts every day of the week with that question.

Yep. Can I watch? Can I watch, right? And by the way, as long as your children, so my goal, and this is what I lay out and how to raise a healthy gamer, my goal is to teach them, to make them understand, help them understand. Once they understand, they won't keep asking you the questions. Right. Do your kids ask you, oh, hey, can I touch the hot pan?

Can I touch the hot stove? Can I touch the hot stove? Do they ask that every week? It's because they haven't understood because you're doing the mental work for them. You're restricting them. Yeah. Right. So you're never teaching them gun safety. Yeah. You're just saying no guns, no guns, no guns. Okay, here, hold a gun. Now push the trigger. Now I'm taking it away. Right. You're not letting them learn how to use it. So this is what I did with my kids. they'd say, can we, can we watch? And I would say yes. So 45 minutes go by, I say, hey, like, let's go to the playground.

And they say, no, we want to watch more. We want to watch more. I say, okay, fine. So I pause for a second. I say, how are you all feeling? Do you really want to watch? I'll invite them to, like, check in with themselves. And then, you know, 30 minutes later, they want to watch for another 45 minutes,

15 minutes later. They're fighting with each other. They're like, they're rolling around on the bed, right? They're like six. They don't feel good. They don't feel good. Yeah. But they still don't.

want to stop. So I'll force them to stop. We'll pause. I'll say, how do you feel? Are you guys having fun? And they'll be like, yeah. And I'm like, is this what fun looks like, right? Do you, are you smiling? Are you smiling right now? And they're like, no. And they kind of understand that then I'll forcibly remove them. Then we'll go to the playground. And I let them play for 15 minutes. And I'll say, hey, do you guys want to go back and watch? Or do you want to stay at the playground? And of course, they say, I want to stay at the playground. Maybe your kids don't. But. And so I think I, I The key thing is that once they're at the playground and then they stay for an hour, right, then we go back and then we're going to have lunch and then I'll invite them to reflect. Okay, so what did y'all notice? Do you all have wanted to stay for two hours? How much fun are you actually having in the first 30 minutes and the second 30 minutes? How does this stuff work? You guys tell me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And it's amazing how much when you invite them to like pay attention because so many parents operate between on and off.

the real money is before it turns on and after it turns off. Oh, that's good. I like that. Right? So to think a little bit where people ask, can I get a cell phone? It's the wrong question. Or my kid is asking for a cell phone. Can I get him a cell phone?

It's the wrong question. The question is, once you get a cell phone, what are your responsibilities? How are you going to use it responsibly? These are the conversations you need to be having with your kid. You can absolutely get a cell phone if you can be responsible with it. What is responsibility? mean. So oftentimes what I'll do is we'll sort of talk, we'll have these conversations with

our kids and parents will be blown away. So you have a kid who plays too many video games. And then we'll sit down and we'll ask them, okay, what do you like about the game? Well, I like, you know, playing with my friends. And it's so sad because I really feel for these kids as someone who's a gamer, right? Because parents are like, I want them to play for one hour a day. And I'm like, that is so terrible. Right?

It's kind of like the whole point of of gaming is you don't like do it for one hour a day You go on a rabbit hole Yeah, right? Like you want to like play until you're satisfied It's like hey, I'm going to take you to a baseball game We're going to go to two innings a day It's like that's not that's not how it's fun I'm going to go to one game a month and watch the whole game

Absolutely right so so I'll tell something of these parents and I'll ask them you know talk to your kid about what they like about gaming Yeah And then their mind will be blown, but then we'll develop a plan of like, okay, what does your kid really want? And what we come up with is, okay, this is what you're going to do. These are your responsibilities. Every day you're going to have an activity. You're going to go to martial arts. You're going to go to tennis.

You're going to do math tutoring. You're going to be home. You're going to be at the dinner table at 645 so you can help set the table. We set out all these things. I know it sounds unbelievable. But we can get there. But when Friday rolls around, okay, five. Friday you get home, we're going to order you pizza.

You can start gaming at 5 p.m. You can sleep at dawn. Yeah. You can get up at noon. You need to be up by lunch the next day. Yeah, yeah. Okay? And then you're going to be with us on Saturday.

And then on Sunday, we're going to have like a family day. But you can stay up all night. We're going to get you a two-liter thing of Mountain Dew, right? If you do, if you live your life responsibly, you get a, get this game as a reward. There is recreation and then there is the rest of your life. And those two things can be combined. How do you navigate?

And actually, we're not quite as on the sleep, but that's actually how we live our life, which I love. Like Friday night, I'm pretty disciplined about what we eat. Friday night, wheels are off, man. Yeah, absolutely. Family movie night. And, hey, and my son over time is like,

can I go in here and play with my buddies on this? Absolutely, dude, knock your lights out. how do you manage safety yeah so a couple of things um so safety with relation to like the people that they encounter on the internet yeah because yeah what i can make i ran the streets growing up like we would go spend the night somebody's house and we'd come back we try to be back before the parents are awake right and just being silly right doing silly dumb stuff so the lack of sleep fine the health the drinking in Tudor and might do, fine. I'm more worried about the nefarious characters that I don't know are coming in. So what are you afraid is going to happen to your 15 year old son?

I'm afraid that somebody's going to come into that group that's not a part of that group. And what? And go down rabbit holes that there's going to be chat responses of suddenly someone's someone's picking on 15 year old kids and now they come they start coming back and forth and now suddenly there's a they respond like harassment harassment like um he's a big humongous 15 year old so let me put insert my daughter here that somebody's going to encourage her to go outside and i'm gonna come like and pick you up because i got some cool stuff for you right okay someone's gonna traffic my kid or somebody's going to hey send me a good i my my uh my former career was looking at somebody

convincing finally wearing somebody down until they sent a topos photo right that's the stuff I'm worried about. Okay. So it's a completely valid fear, but let's like put things in perspective. Okay. So the most dangerous person from a sexual predation standpoint for your daughter is going to be someone she knows. Correct. Right. So strangers on the internet are they dangerous? But statistically, I think something like, I don't remember the number. It's probably around 75% or higher of like the threats to her.

Somebody I know. Is someone you know. Correct. Right. It's going to be, chances are it's going to be like someone who's older than her, who's going to be a man who's a member of your. family or social circle. Or somebody's brother. Or someone's brother, right? So this is where, like, let's just put the numbers in perspective. You should be way more worried about when she goes on sleepovers than you should about an internet stranger. That's one of the things I'm militant on. Yeah. Okay. That being said, there are risks, right? There are absolutely risks. So that's where a couple things that I recommend. One is that generally speaking, if your child has access to a device

in their room, that increases usage by 50%. Okay. So what I recommend is, is keeping in common spaces. Correct. And secondly, no headphones speakers. Perfect. Right? So then you hear what they're saying. Or at least they assume you might be hearing what they're saying.

Exactly. Exactly. Right? And then the most, the most powerful thing that you can do is be involved. Hey, who do you play games with online? Right. And that's where if your kid is afraid, so we recommend something in the book, which is for the first month that you talk to your kids about gaming, you don't try to punish them. You don't try to make any changes based on what they say. And you even approach them and explicitly tell them that, hey, I know you play a lot of games.

I just want to understand why. You know, can you explain this gaming stuff to me? What do you like about it? Do you have friends? Do you not have friends? What are your friends like? How old are they? You know, I just want to understand.

I'm not going to change anything for the first month. Later on, we're going to start to figure out limits. What's safe. Yeah, yeah. But I would love when I set limits, I would love it if I understood how you felt. I would love to set those limits with you instead of without you, right? And that's how we get to these plans of kid is grinding Monday through Thursday and Friday comes along.

It's like, good job. Now your parents, and it's amazing the kids will be on your side. Because the idea for a kid that dad is going to order me pizza and I get to game all night and then, you know, like that's so foreign to them. Right? That's what they really want and you're giving it to them and they're doing all the healthy stuff, which was what they want too. because your 15-year-old son knows that he needs to be studying hard. He knows he needs to be athletic, right? Because he may have a crush on someone.

And if he's got acne and he's, like, severely overweight and doesn't know how to socialize. He's not going to feel good, right? And if you layer what you're saying on top of something that's been, this is my wife's idea, early on was to always point out how good he feels after a good night's sleep. And now I have a 15-year-old that's like, dude, I'm going to bed. I'm like, stay up with your dad. And he's like, dude, I'm going to bed. And that's wired in, right?

So that all night begins to take care of itself because he knows that path too. Absolutely. So two things there, right? The important conversation happens before it turns on and after it turns off, your wife stumbled into that. Yeah. Right?

Which is beautiful. And then the next thing... Or when he gets up at noon the next morning, be like, you feel great, huh? Yeah. So, and that's the other thing is once children understand, so it's not just kids, right? So I work with people who are addicted to technology

from, you know, our kids, all the way to like seniors. And the basic problem with all these apps and stuff is that we are not aware of the impact it's having us. The moment, what's happening is we are touching a hot stove, but we have lydicane on our hand, so we're not feeling anything. Then we wake up the next day and we're like, what happened to my hand? We burned our hand. Right?

So we're not even aware. Like, just pay attention to yourself. And that's teaching, going full circle, that's teaching emotional regulation. That's teaching, here's how your body feels. Yeah, I would even say it's not even regulation yet. We're not, that's where it'll end up. I would say it's teaching awareness. Yeah.

Awareness. Forget about regulation. So this is where, you know, one thing when I work with like older adults, right? So here's what surprises people. You know, the reason that Healthy Gamer is a thing is because people who are addicted to video games don't want to be addicted. They're not in denial. Like the majority of them. They just don't know how to stop.

And so even when I, you know, I'll work with. like professionals and they take a break and you pull out your phone. I'll ask one really simple question. After you take a 45 minute break where you're scrolling on your phone, do you feel energized afterward?

You feel good. Answers absolutely not. I feel more emotionally drained. It drains you cognitively when you're engaging with your phone. So I think there's a lot of awareness teaching. There's a lot of like, you know, graduated steps. Parents suck at this.

And the reason they suck at this is because they're not willing to let their children fail. Yes. Right? So, I mean, we'll do things. Like, it's like, you know, mom is saying, hey, like, did you, you know, you have to take care of your paper. Is your paper done? And we'll come up with different kinds of rules. Like if you get a, you know, if you get a C, it's like zero hours.

If you get a B, it's this much. If you get an A, it's this much. And then something really dangerous happens, which is parents have a really big disadvantage, which is that they love their kids. So kid comes home and gets a C and parents says, okay, no more gaming. A month into no gaming, kid hasn't gotten rid of a C, right?

Because semesters happen every three months. But now the kid is working really hard. Now the kid is like, you know, working on their papers and they're studying. They got an A on a test. Now kid comes to you and says, hey, I got an A on a test.

Can I play now? And the parent is the one who violates it. Well, and I think even beneath the and parents love their kids is parents really want their kids to like them. Absolutely. And I can't live in the tension of my kid doesn't like me right now, which I think is job number three or four besides keep alive is you got to have seasons where your kids don't like you. And that's right. It's right and good. I had a tough conversation with my daughter a couple weeks ago where I said to her, I know what I'm doing is making you not like me.

and if we're not careful, our relationship will evolve in a way where we don't like each other. And I'm okay with that. What I'm teaching you and how important this, I would rather you hate me and do this and learn this than you like me and not do this. This is how important this is to me.

I love you enough to let you not like me right now. Yeah, and I think it was hard for her and it was hard for me, but I think like we ended up in a good place. Always, always, yeah. And so I think a lot of it, anyway, going back to the gaming thing, so I think it's having conversations with them. Yeah. Enrolling them in developing a healthy practice, right?

That's what we really want to do. Hey, I'm here to provide some structure for you right now, but three years from now, you're going to be out of the house, you're going to be on your own. I literally, I just gave a talk to middle schoolers and high schoolers where I was like, you know, right now you guys are living this way. What happens in three years when y'all are when you all are, when you all are. out on your own. Like, are you going to be able to control it? Okay. So, and they're terrified. Okay, I've got a conviction now. Tell me if I'm right. Yeah. I think you're, I think I'm right. You shouldn't want to be. So if I wanted to change the health

of my home, right? Just the overall nutritional and physical health of my home. Okay. The greatest thing I could do would not be to post a bunch of workout plans on the walls. The greatest thing I could do for my kids would be to start waking up and exercising in the morning and letting up see me live this to participate in cooking healthy meals so that they have a lived experience, a picture, a moving picture of one of the most important people in their life doing this thing. More is caught than taught. I've heard it said. And then as they begin to get curious and ask questions and I bring them along, but it's got to be a lived experience.

And so what I'm, is that, is that fair? I would not say that's the greatest thing that you can do. Okay, what's the greatest thing? I think the greatest thing that you could do is have them be aware of the impact of food on their body. Right. Yeah, yeah. We're going to have conversations about it. No, no, no. I mean, so, so like, like, I mean, I'm not, I think we're getting maybe a bit lost in the details here. But, like, you know, one of my kids has constipation. And so just showing her the link

Between this food and this outcome Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So like what did you eat today? What did you eat today? And asking her, okay, like, what do you think your poop is going to be like tomorrow? Correct, yes. Right?

And even if you don't like this thing, I think the most important, the greatest gift, I believe, that we can give our kids is the gift of awareness. It's not even teaching. It's not even modeling. Right?

And by awareness, you mean, you mean, like, Action and consequence. Here's a link. The simple act of observation. That's it, yeah. So I know this sounds crazy, but the reason the world is going to hell right now

is because technology has taken away our awareness. Anytime you use technology, you lose yourself. That's what we love about it. We don't realize how we're being programmed. Right? So if you look at it, like, I mean, I had this problem when I was in medicine, school, you know, I would wake up in the morning, I would listen to a lecture while I was cooking

breakfast, eating while I'm listening to a lecture, you know, earbuds are in, walk into the train, studying on the train, walking to the lecture hall, because I needed to be efficient. Right. But I was never, I was always like externalizing my focus. I wasn't just with here. Yeah. And I did something that people think is insane. So I was studying a ton and I saw all, everyone around me is studying a ton. So monkey see, monkey do, right? And I wasn't doing the best, and I was like, this is not working for me. So thankfully, I had spent seven years studying and become a monk, and I just paid attention to myself.

I was like, this is not working. So I made up this plan where I would wake up at 4.30 every morning. I would study for two hours before I went to class. I would go to class. I would finish my day around between three and five, I would come home and I was done. I made a rule that prior to tests, I would study more, especially on the weekends. But generally speaking in med school, I studied two hours a day. And I got two awards for academic achievement.

You have to understand the way that. you work. Right? You have to have awareness of how things are affecting you. As long as my hand is numb, I'll keep touching a hot stove. You don't need to teach them anything. Yeah. The human instrument is designed to learn, but it can only learn if it is aware. Right. As a counselor, as a therapist, when you work with couples, what causes problems? They don't understand how their actions are. They're not aware of the impact of their actions. They don't see that other person. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And sometimes we'll run into things like denial with addiction, which is denial is intentional lack of awareness. We numb ourselves. Oh, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this is, going on and you're not aware that these are even fires. I mean, I asked you an hour ago. Yeah. And you're like, I didn't even realize it was a problem.

So people don't, we really don't realize. Yeah. How powerful awareness is. And awareness is the greatest. driver for behavioral change. Everyone thinks we need willpower or we need discipline. It's nonsense. Just the moment that you understand, hey, this thing is good for me.

Yeah. And what's really interesting is, you know, as you get older, you can't, you become more aware. Yeah. Right? So like your stomach can't handle things the way. And it signals you. Yeah. And then you start to eat healthier automatically.

Yeah. So I think with kids really practicing awareness is the key thing. Okay. Now, just to kind of quickly summarize, because you asked a question about your... Well, I was saying what... So yes, if I, to use this analogy, and here's where I was going with it, if I... I'm going to sit down and say, hey, this is good for you, this is how you feel, here's a couple examples. I'm going to, I'm going to be the behavior change in this house, and I want to be demonstrative about how good I feel.

If I want my son to have a healthy... the relationship when he leaves my home in two and a half years, then is it beneficial for me to, A, continue with the awareness trajectory. How do you feel this morning after being up playing all night? Yeah, right. And B, hey, would you invite me in? I want to learn how to do this. Absolutely. So I- You know what I'm saying? Like, I want to begin to model this here. Yeah. So I think the problem, John, is that, so I'm all for modeling. Yeah. But I think the most important modeling modeling is program it's not programming but it you know it helps some yeah but but i think joining your kid is great and i think the really scary thing is that like you're so why are you

modeling because you want him to be a certain way yeah right that's what i think is really hard for parents to let go of right you want him to be a certain way which makes you a great dad and is going to statistically do of course yeah yeah yeah yeah but i think there's a deeper deeper deeper level to this, which is not, I'm going to show you how to do it the right way. This is really scary. It's you are going to figure out how to do what the right way is. And I'm going to create an environment where you are going to come to your own conclusions. Oh, that's scary with kids. Very scary. Yeah. Huh. Right. And so I think. But knowing that kids are not going to come to the right conclusions most of the time. Is that fair? My goodness. Is that fair? Oh my God, John.

Is that right? I didn't realize I was sitting with God because you know what is right and you know what is wrong. Oh, wow, holy. I thought I would drop that on you here at the end. So, oh, they're coming to the right conclusions. Yeah.

Not the right. That's a bad way to put that. The same, right? No, I'm going to say the safe. Here's where I'm finding myself and I'm doing it and then we got to wrap this thing up. Kelly's waving at me. I got you.

I'll tell this quick story and I'm just realizing in real time this is happening. You're a great therapist, well done. My dad was a homicide detective, and there's a famous story in our house where we lived outside north of Houston and in about as safe as a suburban environment as exist on planet Earth.

And he came and picked me up from work and drove me out, and he always had his suit on. He was a detective, always had a suit. He'd sit outside of my baseball. He'd helped coach in a suit. It was awesome. We pulled back in after being gone an hour and a half, and I had left the back door open.

And he looked at that back door, and he looked at me and said, I knew it. And out of nowhere, he pulls out a gun and goes and clears the house. And I remember being 10 going, that's an overreaction, right? That's a lot, right? But his lived experience was all he did every day was homicide investigation. So my whole career has been students who get themselves in trouble with technology in situations they can't take back ever.

Absolutely. And that has shifted my bell curve in a profound way. And I'm realizing that right here. Absolutely, right? So this is the really scary thing. The things that you know are right weren't when you were growing up. Yeah. They've worked up until this point.

The really scary thing about technology, the world that are children, are going to inherit is astronaut for the last 2000 between the years 1900 and zero right the world was roughly is similar yeah yeah right so sure there was industrialization and things like that but like you know still back then more people died of starvation than obesity like something weird has happened in our society and that rate of change is only increasing right right so that's why i think like you know what what i try to lay out in the book and this is kind of the summary for you is first of all understand how technology affects the brain. We kind of lay that out.

Secondly, understand how to communicate with your child. Right? So we teach communication techniques, which I'm sure you know we're well open-ended questions. Oh, yeah, yeah. Right, we really need to listen to our kids because we need their information. Yep. That also models once you start listening to them, they're going to start listening to you. Yeah.

But most parents with technology, it's on, off, you're going to do it my way or the highway. They model that behavior. Yeah. Then comes shared boundaries. setting, right? So we're going to develop a plan. You get your, your child doesn't get a vote. This is absurd. Everyone's like, oh my God, no. You're a dictator. They're the advisory council, but they're also the experts. So you're going to listen to what they say. And then you develop boundaries. And then you got to be careful because there's a lot of stuff that we do to shoot

ourselves in the foot, which we talked about, right? Because you don't want your kid to dislike you. So there's a lot of, you know, tolerating your kid. They're never going to learn unless you let them fall. Right. They have to tolerate the discomfort. Right. Which means I got as a parent

have to hold it. Absolutely, right? And so I think that you're doing a phenomenal job, but I think it starts with, and I know we're all supposed to say and say the but. But I think there's,

you know, you got to understand that your kid is going into a world where you can teach him how to use a gun, but someone is going to sell him a nuke.

Right. Right. So you have to teach. Literally. Literally. You're going to, You have to teach, you can't teach him how to be safe with this. You have to teach him how to learn.

How to think safely. Exactly. Yes. Right? How to think safely. You have to teach him how to learn how to develop a healthy relationship with technology instead of imbueing him with a particular idea. Right.

Because most kids, and I hate to be this binary, but most kids will either placate you till they're out the door or they will fight you. Yep. And you'll lose a relationship. Yep. So, so the foundation is. You can never be sober. So if I had to summarize the work that I do with kids,

you can never be sober for someone else. Exactly. And that includes your kids. Yeah. So there's nothing you can do to make them have a healthy relationship. You have to teach them, hopefully, fingers crossed, how to develop their own healthy relationship.

Right? So you can't do the work for them. They have to struggle with the device themselves. Yeah. And it's about creating the best environment to do that. Thanks for coming, dude. All right, man. Thank you so much.

This is great.