Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. And today, an extra special guest. That is Dr. Richard Freed.
And Richard, I'll give you the briefest introduction. I don't want this to sound like your obituary before you're done. But Richard is just one of my one of my heroes.
He's a, I think it'd be fair to say a leading expert in Silicon Valley's use of persuasive design, which I think of as kind of psychological manipulation, you know, via video games, social media and so on. Richard's, you know, appeared in all these blue ribbon media outlets like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Washington Post and so on. But recently, I caught when Richard, you testified at the California State Assembly, the Judiciary Committee, which I'm so glad they had you over to speak to them.
Richard's, I would say, Richard, your main thrust of many things. And we've known each other for a long time. But more recently, what's come into sharp focus is the unethical practice, particularly psychologists who who themselves support persuasive design.
And that takes a lot of courage to stand up to that, to really speak out against psychologists who are taking part in psychological manipulation. But most of all, Richard, you and I are both dads of two daughters. That's possibly our biggest qualification.
So welcome, Richard. Kim, thank you so much. It's an honor to be here.
You reading, you know, when I think when I first started going down this rabbit hole way too many years ago, you're writing your leadership on all sorts of things, but screens included. You understood them to be before, essentially, I think everyone else like an attachment object that would that that pose competition to the things that our kids really need to do to grow up to be happy and successful. And you've led my thoughts and understanding.
So thank you for everything you've done. Yeah, when we first met back in Sacramento a long time ago after after a workshop, we stood out on those steps and talked for a long time. So here we are all these years later.
I remember that was a great talk. Yeah. A lot of people came to see you.
We were just talking about how many people come to see you. That's as you say, that's a good problem to have. So.
The I wonder if we can just start out with with if you would describe the persuasive design and and what stands behind that and the algorithms that stand behind that, because I think you're the sort of the right out in the leading edge of of of pulling back the curtains on what Silicon Valley does. It's like a it's almost like a like a sort of secret science. I think I read somewhere you described it like that.
Could you just give us an overview of this and then we'll we'll dig more into it. Kim, thank you. It is a secret science that that parents, health care providers, educators don't know because it's purposefully hidden.
And I think the best description of it is by a key father of persuasive design, Dr. BJ Fogg at Stanford University, but his group really called it machines designed to change humans. And that encapsulates it a lot like aren't we as humans supposed to design machines for our purposes, but that's not how persuasive design works. It's creating.
It's the secret science is this joining together of forces of the highest levels of Silicon Valley and the highest levels of psychology, neuroscience, AI coming together to say, how can we build screen products that we label as entertainment that are designed, as you say, to manipulate at their core to manipulate behavior. You know, and the complexity of this is mind blowing, actually. But the kicker in all this, and I know you picked this up, is that a lot of these folk who are designing this actually have inside information at what this is doing to kids brain development, social, emotional development.
And they have low or no screen homes themselves, right? Yes, I call this group the tech elite there at the very top of industry. I mean, the handful at the very top of what I call the Silicon Valley propaganda machine, these PR bodies that they tell the world, oh, we're health, but they're really industry funded PR. And at the top of the child health industry, they are taking dramatic actions to protect their own.
And that's one of the things that motivated me to write, is like, I see these people tout, like, I'm protecting my kids at home. Meanwhile, their organizations are saying, this is all good for your kids. Your kids should be in front of social media and video games.
It's all good. Meanwhile, they're the founders of all this, or what's behind these organizations are saying, my kid gets one life, your kids gets another. And that just upsets me.
I see the families in my practice get really hurt. And that's what drives me to write. I think that just about more than anything, like, my kid's special.
My kid's going to be happy, healthy, successful. But my kids in my practice suffer. And I just can't stomach that.
And I feel like I need to say something. You know, and we should sort of level down into that a little bit, because you write in your book about this. And it's a place we were just chatting before we began recording about how this exists at a primitive level.
And even at a genetic level, what this is actually messing with, with our kids, with our children, our tweens, our teens, that it's really manipulating something very, very basic in what it is to be a human at that foundational level. Can you say a little more about that? Sure. It's so amazing to me to share this time with you, just because you understand this so well.
Or this is things you've understood, I think, before me. I stared at persuasion. You know, I was, someone said, put together a talk for kids and maybe help them understand a little bit what's behind the screen.
And this was years ago. And I went down that. I'm like, I had sort of known that there were psychologists back there doing this.
But then I'm like, oh, dear. I really found persuasive design. I really saw what was doing.
The level of science and the sophistication. And I'm a psychologist. But I, like, at a granular level, this was beyond anything that I could understand and do understand now when it really gets to the specifics.
But if you stare at it long enough, what you realize, these companies and psychologists are doing and neuroscientists are building consumer technologies that young people experience as better than real life. And hence the title of my book. And of course they aren't better than real life, but they're experienced by kids, not as just more entertaining than real life, but felt down deep in their DNA, in their core, as this is what I should be doing to be a successful human.
This is, we really see some gender based differences. Girls from a young age have these social strengths in social cognition. So we're going to build social media, like the industry would be happy to consume boys lives, but it really gets our girls who are really, they've brought communities together.
They've helped everyone work together throughout human history. But we're going to take that social strength and we're going to develop it into a science that changes girls. We're going to build for boys largely, video games that are designed to have them feel at their core, like this is what I should be doing.
And that's why, as you say in a very recent podcast of yours, when we ask kids to step away, it's like, why did my well behaved kid throw an uncharacteristic tantrum or far worse? And that's because we are pulling them away from something that they feel down deep in their soul as this is my, this is what I should be doing here on earth to be a successful human. This is going at my DNA. Recently, Richard, there's been, I've been watching the development of those two platforms, the social networking platform, which really draws our girls in, not exclusively, but and then the gaming, which really draws the boys in.
I don't wish to be sort of binary about this. It's just that that's the data. And then I noticed the creeping in of the combination of the two via platforms like Discord, where now you've got the boys playing video games, but communicating in a pseudo social networking and you've got the girls in social networking being drawn into gaming.
And so the audience just kind of doubled. And that was, and I watched, I watched with amazement and concern at how many, for example, girls now are getting involved in gaming because they've wrapped it up in the social side. Have you noticed that? That's amazing that you see that.
I think industry looks at their demographic data and say, wow, this is great that we've, the gaming industry has consumed boys. Boys aren't oftentimes going to school or leaving real life behind, but like we're missing out on girls. What can we do? And I love that mention of Discord and bringing in the social elements.
And then for on the girl side, like, you know, like, oh, the social media is great, but how can we bring in more boys? And so I think there are, I mean, these are, I live near Silicon Valley. These are giant towers with these giant facades and they, they are an unparalleled industry that has unparalleled insight and power and data. And they know their data and they say, what can we do to, if we're missing out on girls or boys, what can we do to tweak things a little bit to get that other, that other side? And so, yes, that's amazing that you notice that.
You know, one of the things when I was interviewing six months back, Melanie Hemp, you know, from ScreenStrong with her release of the book, Kids, Brains and Screens. And we, we focused in a lot on, on dopamine and a little bit of dopamine in our systems is perfectly fine. It's perfectly healthy, normal, but, but we focused in on the very deliberate targeting of dopamine release.
We've always known about adrenaline, cortisol, but the dopamine release, which really does almost parallel, you know, some very serious chemical addictions. Only there's not, there's not the sort of, you know, the external chemical. It's now designed to, to be released into a child's system.
And we've always known about this quick pleasure and reward, pleasure and reward. And the direction I take that is it's really hard to be a parent if a child's playing a video game involved in social networking, quick cycles of pleasure, reward, pleasure, reward. And then you ask them to clean up their rooms because that's not pleasurable.
It's not rewarding quickly. It is maybe if you spend an hour doing it and look back and say, huh. But it's, but it's, it's kind of setting parents up to have a really, really hard time with their kids.
And the irony is that we pay for the devices and pay for the, for the services. It's, it's incredibly smart. But I wonder if you can talk a little bit like drop us down a level or two into what you see as, as the deliberate design around dopamine release.
Because you've done a ton of research into this. What's going on there? Firstly, Melanie is great. ScreenStrong is great.
They're a great resource. Exactly. Dopamine communicates to us like this is what you should, should be doing on earth.
So you see industry create one of the key persuasive design elements that I talk about in Better Than Real Life is this creation of supernormal technologies. Nicholas Tinbergen won the Nobel Prize for discovering supernormal stimuli. And that is manmade, hyped up, jacked up, artificial things and experiences that do two things.
Dump dopamine into an animal, a human, and develop an addictive response. And secondly, pull that animal away from the real world experiences that they're supposed to be engaging in. So he did that with songbirds.
These cute little songbirds. He painted these giant Dayglo blue plastic eggs with polka dots. And that overwhelmed these songbirds.
They left behind their real world eggs to clamber up on top of these giant eggs. And it goes right after their DNA. Because that's how persuasive design works.
It oftentimes hacks our stone age vulnerabilities. And for humans, we see the fast food industry create supernormal foods. Like we're going to send chemists into labs that create foods that have the perfect combination of fat, salt, and sugar and just overwhelm us.
For most of human history, if you could find, as a hunter-gatherer, all this fat, salt, and sugar, you're a winner. But today, life has changed. So today, let's say with social media, how can we take this product but make it a supernormal product? A supernormal technology.
We talked about girls having this strength in social relationships. Social media is not a – it's sold as a place for kids to communicate. It is not.
Pull back the curtain, and it is a powerful science of supernormal technology. Girls and boys, but their relationships are – we're going to take normal relationships, but we're going to quantify them. We're going to make them for the whole world to see.
So you are dramatically sensitized to the fact that you have a low follower count. We're going to actually put a number on how many friends and likes and who tagged your photo. And then we're going to gamify that into this contest of who can have more likes and followers.
And that creates a supernormal technology which will suck kids' lives away from the family that should be number one. Their school engagement, going outdoors, all things real world to live alone in a room on a device. And they believe that's what they should be doing.
That's how powerful it is. A little while ago, Richard, I think I actually mentioned this on one of these little podcasts that I do. But I succeeded in infiltrating a marketing conference, like a premier marketing conference.
And I couldn't get into it for years. They must have checked people out. Because if they checked me out, there I was on network television being rude about them, actually.
But anyway, over COVID, they must have been checking – I got in. Anyway, the reason I'm mentioning this is that there they all were. And it was very heavily weighted towards the gaming industry, the social networking industry.
They all were the leaders, the world leaders, really, of marketing these products. And the reason I mention it is that about 15 minutes into an extremely popular, like hundreds and hundreds of people, it was a workshop called the successful case studies in the successful removal of purchasing friction. And I thought, oh, a lot of people are going there, so I'll go there.
And it was about 15 minutes into that presentation, I realized that we have a new name. Richard, you and me as parents, we have a new name. They don't call us parents.
They call us purchasing friction. Wow. That's our new name.
And then they went through a series of strategies of how via the screens they remove our values from children's lives. And they spend $16 billion a year on doing this. And it's the removal of adults who are the primary attachment for children and transfer the primary attachment to the screen.
Isn't that just, I guess it's not mind blowing to you, but because you research this so much. No, it is. Just to hear this, it makes me feel uneasy to my stomach, just like viscerally, like this is not a good thing.
And I have colleagues, not patients. I have patients, hundreds of kids in my practice over the years who have formerly well-behaved kids gone into when mom's taking a shower, dad's doing something. And they go into their wallet and they steal their credit card and they go purchase an insane amount of, so just to hear you say that makes me feel ill.
I have a colleague whose son spent $1,500 on virtual gaming items. And to see the tragedy and how that changes the family forever, because here's my formerly well-behaved kid. Yes, they used to do this, but here's a kid taking, that's grand theft money.
From me, and that changes childhood, that changes trust, that changes the trajectory of where we were going as a family. And it just makes me sad to see that. And then I really think those marketers are going to go home and say, not my kid.
We're going to take the insane amount of money that we make here, and I'm going to send my kid to a school that doesn't have very many screens. We're going to invest in all these activities and this nice community where my kid can live to be away from that, because I understand what happens to my kid. So as we wrap up this thoroughly depressing episode, because we'll pick this up next week when we put out the next episode.
So the core issue of this persuasive design, Richard, in terms of us and the effect it's having as parents, because I'd love to speak about that a little bit more. Because next time we'll talk about who is actually protecting our children, our kids. We'll get into that.
But when you've taken probably a deeper dive than anyone else, almost anyone else I know, into this, how do you see that translate out into the family situation and into our parenting? And what should we be looking out for as parents? You can't be a clinician in clinical practice. And I mean, every day families are coming in to my practice saying, my kid won't leave their room, won't get out of bed, won't do this. They must be depressed.
They need medication. My kid's failing school. But you go look, and by the time our kids, this generation of kids in the U.S., hit teen years, they are now spending an average of eight hours and 30 minutes on a screen.
So the world is telling at the expense of other things. Parents are not hearing the message that screens will cause all these problems. So they come in and say, essentially, we called the police.
My kid put his fist to a wall and threatened to kill us all. Okay, that's uncharacteristic. What happened? Well, we asked him.
He's failing school. I pulled the plug on his video games. Yes.
And that kind of action is, that kind of kids whose lives are falling apart or dramatically hurt by screens, that happens every day in my practice. Every day. So just as a last point before we round off, what should we be looking out for? Like, you know, a parent listening in, watching into this is saying, okay, how do we know when something has, when that persuasive design has crossed the line and is now intrusive in our family? Before the depression-like symptoms, if we sort of move that back, dial that back a little bit, what are the early warning signs you see in your practice? You know, it starts early.
Persuasive design is built to go after young kids, and we hear that screen habits are built starting from infancy. I think we can assume that when we give kids iPads and screens and smartphones from a young age, I mean, you see it in a stroller, or you see the remarkable drug-like effects of a kid. It seems like a remarkable benefit that, wow, my infant or toddler was able to be captivated by a smartphone or iPad throughout all of a dinner, and we didn't have to say one word to this kid or have them engage.
Isn't that magical? Like, that same family is going to come to me in a few short years and say, why does my kid not want to pick up a book? Why does my kid hate school? Why do they just want to live a life on a screen? So we can look, we can just assume that those kind of things are going to happen with today's powerful technologies. So we want to do all we can. We can talk about treatment, but we want to do all we can to understand, wow, if we can do everything we can to prevent this predictable issue, like, let's do that.
Well, so what we've done is sort of laid out some of the issues. And I think it's important, even though it's a dark picture and we can dig a little more into it too, but we've laid that out and we'll pick that up in the next episode. A little bit more of that.
I'd love to hear more about your research, but also then what can we do? What is it that we can do to empower our families? Okay, so we'll pick that up in our next conversation.
