Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is more worried about your phone than your body

24:38In this time since I've left office, I've continued to be really passionate about wanting to improve well-being. And I feel a deep sense of urgency around this. But here's what I have come to realize. And I realized this in office. And in office, I was trying to broaden the lens through which we look at health so that we see it as having four dimensions. Our physical health, which we're familiar with. Our mental health, which we started to talk more about in the last couple of decades. Our social health, which has to do with healthy relationships. And our spiritual health, which has to do with where we find meaning and purpose.

25:11Spiritual health isn't just about, am I religious or not? Do I belong to a faith organization or not? It's about what sustains our spirit, which is our source of meaning and purpose. These four dimensions of our health matter if we want to support overall well-being. And the reason that I've focused more in my podcast, Substack, Public Remarks, on the mental health, social health, and spiritual health dimensions of well-being is because that's where the big gaps are right now. Physical health is incredibly important, and I'm always happy to talk about it. But there are more people talking about physical health, not enough people talking about these other dimensions of health.

25:46And I think we need to pay attention to all four.

25:48Max:There's also a growing perception that some of the physical health stuff is backfiring. Like you see these videos of guys waking up at 4 a.m., having a protein shake, working out alone in kind of a minimalist condo for three hours and lecturing about how you should never drink. And in particular, I guess about alcohol, there's a sense of like maybe we over-talked a little too far on the risks of alcohol because alcohol is fundamentally this social drug. And that, you know, would you rather somebody didn't go out and didn't drink or would you rather they went out drunk, meth people, got married?

26:16Max:I mean, I don't know if that's exactly a tradeoff, but you're somebody who's campaigned against alcohol specifically. And I'm curious if you're thinking on that has changed at all. Well, here's what I'd say. I do think we have a problem. This question brought to you by the American Spirit Council, obviously. So let me take two separate things you mentioned, which I think both are important, Ben. And one is this, what I think of as a culture of hyper-optimization, and it's usually self-optimization, where you see those videos of people working out with 7 % body fat, yet somehow eating everything they want, and like living these perfect lifestyles with like eight-pack abs.

26:54But no other people. And, well, here's the thing. Like, we used to think about social media as being something that generated eating disorders and body dysmorphia among girls. Well, increasingly we're seeing that among boys too because they are seeing these exact same videos, right? And when I would do roundtables, I started to hear about this years ago from students, from young men and boys who would say, you know, I feel like I'm a failure. Why do you feel like you're a failure? Well, because I don't have a six pack. I don't have 7 % body fat. I'm not lean. No one's ever gonna want me. I feel like I just can't get there.

27:31And I'm like, that's not real life. Even most of these people online don't look like that, but they don't look like that. So I think we have this culture of self-optimization that has gone, I think, to an extreme where everyone is trying to get the exact right supplement in a regimen. They're trying to get the exact right workout routine. You have influencers who have built massive businesses based on this. Some of them might be with great intention, but I think the overall effect, the pendulum has swung way to the extreme. I think what's really important in life and what I and many other people in public health speak to is an overall sense of balance in our life.

28:04We all don't need to have 7 % body fat to look like these models, but we can be healthier. That doesn't mean that we should say that obesity is just the way it is. We should be taking steps to ensure that people have healthy body weights and that they feel good about their bodies. Finally, to the point about alcohol that you raised. So when I was in office, one of the last reports I put out was specifically about alcohol and cancer risk. This was really important because the data has been not just building, I would say piling up for years, showing that there is a causal link, not just an association, a causal link between alcohol and at least seven types of cancer, including breast cancer.

28:48And when I used to take care of patients over the years who had cancer, one of the first questions that they would ask or their families would ask is, was there something I could have done to reduce my risk? And when I came, when I realized that this data, we had this data on alcohol and cancer risk, and I was putting together this report, I'll just tell you this, since we're just being like open and honest here, there were so many people in DC on both sides of the aisle who did not want me to put out this report. I remember one conversation and they're like, do you really need to do this? And here was my response.

29:25I said, look, what I'm saying in this report is not that no one should ever drink. It's not that if you have one sip of alcohol that you're definitely getting cancer. That's not what we're saying here. But what I am saying here is that at the levels that the United States has told its people that it's, quote unquote, safe to drink, two drinks a day for men, one drink a day for women, that we see a significant increase in cancer risk, and people don't know about that.

29:53Max:But now sort of thinking about it, as you think about loneliness, I mean, do you think that was a trade? Like maybe you have accepted an increase. It sounds like there's just a straight-ahead trade-off between cancer risk and loneliness risk. And as a scientist, you're just sort of instinctively going to just talk about the first one. No, I absolutely don't buy that. I mean, and here's why. Because do people, you know, get together and socialize with alcohol? Absolutely. For some people, is it a social lubricant? Absolutely, yes. but this notion that somehow if people choose not to drink, suddenly their social life is going to crash or their likelihood of building a friendship or maintaining a friendship is going to wither away, that is absolutely not the case.

30:36And that's a choice that we have to make. Look, I have had many patients who have told me when I've talked to them and counseled them around quitting smoking, they've said, well, this is something I do socially with my friends, right? I've taken care people who use other forms of drugs as well over the years. And they say, this is a man who socially with friends. So we say, well, there's a trade-off here. It's probably okay to smoke because otherwise people may get lonely. We don't say that. Well, hold on, but wait a second. You're talking about a loneliness crisis.

31:03Max:Why don't we say that? It seems like you're willing to accept trade-offs on everything except for the thing that you're spending all your time worrying about. No, no, no. But I agree. Having a cigarette with a friend is actually a way to, you know, college. No, let's talk about everything is trade-offs, right? And I have not said that, And again, I'll reiterate what I said at the very beginning. I'm not saying no one should ever drink. I'm not saying that the same decision is right for every single person. You probably are saying no one should ever smoke, right? I'm not really arguing with that.

31:31Well, with smoking, I am saying no one should ever smoke because I think that the risks aren't acceptable, but everyone has to make that decision for themselves, right? And in the same way, when it comes to alcohol, people have to make that decision for themselves. And people may come out in different places depending on what their risk is, what they're willing to tolerate. that I accept and that's as it should be. But that was my point with our alcohol report is that if we want people to be able to make fully informed decisions, they should have the information. And any circumstance where we know about risk and choose not to share that with people, in my mind, that's just wrong because you're denying people the opportunity to make a fully informed decision.

32:10So that's what I think is true. Now, I'll ask you to say this. I think we should be giving people, I think, especially young people, I think a foundation for building a social connection that is healthy. I think if they're reliant on cigarettes, if they're reliant on social media, if they're reliant on something else, you know, to, in order to be able to have a conversation with somebody, I think we have to ask ourselves a deeper question, which is, is something going wrong here? And like, I talk to young people, you know, all the time now who say that having in-person in conversations with people is stressful because they're not used to that.

32:47Most of the conversations are online. I'll tell you both that I was at a university recently and I asked them about the cafeteria, by the way. I said, what's it like? You know, hanging out on campus, what's the cafeteria like? And guys, you know what the word is that they use to describe the cafeteria? It was terrifying. And I said, why is the cafeteria terrifying? They said, well, like you walk in there and there are people you don't know and you may have to sit down next to them and start a conversation. That's like really weird. That's awkward. And so what they were doing is they were finding somebody they knew and linking arms with them and walking into the cafeteria together.

33:23I'll be honest, the way they described it, it sounded like walking into war. Like it was like a battle that they were walking into. And when I did my college campus tour on loneliness and social connection, what I found actually was that the cafeterias were some of the quietest places on campus. And which was like surprising. I don't know what it was like when you guys were in school, but like the cafeteria was the loudest place. like on campus because everyone was just like catching up. And so I was really concerned about that. And so I think there's, I find myself wondering like, because I have kids, you know, who are young, they're eight and nine right now, and they're not immune, you know, to all the forces that are shaping, you know, young people's lives today.

34:03And I find myself thinking like, how can we make sure that our kids have the skills and comfort to reach out to somebody who might be a new student on campus that they don't know and start a conversation, to negotiate maybe a disagreement with a friend, even though that might be hard and might be awkward, or to reach out to somebody who looks like they need help, even if they don't know them, and just say, hey, can I be of assistance? Can I support you in some way? I'm figuring this out like most parents are, but I do think this is one of the more important questions that we have to try to figure out.

34:37Well, we have to take another short break, but we've got a lot more that we want to get to you with Vivek Murthy right after this.

34:50Max:This week on our branded segment from Think with Google, I talked to Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about whether AI is a threat or a boon to creativity. Let's talk about creativity. There's a sense, I think, in parts of the industry that AI is the death of original thinking. But that narrative feels like it's shifting. The first two or three years of this AI transformation we've all been going through has really been defined by fear. What is AI going to do to me? And what I'm seeing coming out of Cannes and all around the world is a new mindset. From fear of what is AI going to do to me to more asking what can I do with AI?

35:27Max:And that positivity is bleeding into the work. And creatives inside of agencies and inside of brands are really leading the charge. You know, it's interesting, if you go back to the early days of cinema, when they first invented the film camera, directors just put it at the end of the soundstage and filmed it like it was a stage play. It took years for the crane shot, for the dolly shot, for the zoom in to become part of the lexicon of cinema. And what I'm seeing is creatives are actually inventing new ways of thinking, new ways of doing with AI. And that's really happening right now. What should marketers do?

36:02Max:I think marketers need to think about AI and move beyond just automation. Yes, you can make your processes and current ways of working 20 % cheaper and more efficient. But if you're just focused on the process automation games, you're missing the bigger picture. Second, I think you really need to think about inspiring creativity at a whole new level. Back in the day, I worked with a creative team who, for reasons, wanted to do a campaign where they painted the Golden Gate Bridge blue. Now that idea died immediately. We knew we could never get the permissions for it, but we also knew it was so prohibitively expensive it wasn't going to happen.

36:39Max:With AI, you can now paint the Golden Gate Bridge blue if you want to. The ability to think beyond the constraints that we were operating on is really inspiring and creative teams are really leaning into that. Third, creativity has sat with creatives. That makes sense. But there is creativity in every part of the marketing organization. design teams, events teams, analytics teams, and inspiring those teams to see AI as a creative tool to actually enable them to bring creativity to every part of their job has been a really big unlock for us and really, really exciting. Where should people go to find out more?

37:15Max:We just met with 20 creative leaders from all around the world. We published it in a Frontier CMO creativity report available at thinkwithgoogle.com. Head on over to thinkwithgoogle.com and look for Frontier CMO Creativity Edition.

37:39The Big, a few minutes ago, you mentioned these rising concerns about eating disorders and whatnot among men. And I personally think, you know, being a man on social media and seeing a lot of these things that technology and social media has a role in that. Were you paying attention to this kind of like looks max or thing that was happening on the internet that's been happening over the last few months. And what have you thought about that? I did see that. I'm slightly horrified by it to be honest with you. I was also struck by how many people were talking about that like in my work circles, friend circles.

38:15It really didn't make its way around. But I think part of what I saw in my own experience is that I think it hit a nerve with a lot of people that I knew because it felt like the culmination of this self-optimization culture that had been building. And I think maybe 10, 15 years ago, we would have looked at this and said, oh, that's absurd. Like we won't go that far, but it feels like we've gone that far in a sense. And while it may seem perhaps different to people like in our, you know, who are in their thirties and forties and fifties, I think if you're, if you're an adolescent, like a growing up today, and this like what you're seeing primarily online, this may seem like the norm.

38:51The idea of doing everything to look as good as you can, including having surgery, taking supplements, doing things which may have other side effects, but it's all worth it if it's maximizing your looks.

39:03Max:Gosh, it's amazing that we've gone this far without talking about COVID because I think, you know, I've been both a huge part of your own career and then also when you think about isolation. Because you were, you know, in the trenches of that just sort of crazy period of response and of trying to figure it out at the end of 2019, the beginning of 2020, and of figuring out the public response. Were in those conversations, were these questions about loneliness and isolation part of that conversation? And I wonder if, as you look back at that period, if you think that the administration kind of underestimated the harm of isolation in the face of more conventional, you know, public health questions and just epidemic questions.

39:41So one of the things that President Biden stated after he got elected in the transition period is that there were a few key goals that he had around the vaccination campaign, around a few other variables. But one of them in particular was reopening schools, right? Because at that time when he took office, or shortly before he took office, many of our schools were still closed, right? Or partially closed. and that had a real impact for kids. So isolation concern across the board, but think about it like when you're in school during a sensitive period of development and you're isolated then, the impacts can be even more pronounced.

40:24And we actually now hear this from young people in survey after survey. So the question was, how do we reopen schools quickly and safely, right? And some of the money that was actually procured from Congress to get to schools to enable them to open more safely was intended at that. But there's another area that I think doesn't get talked about as much with regard to isolation that I find even more challenging, which has to do with workplaces. So there was a whole debate around work from home. Is it good? Is it bad? Is hybrid better? What are the trade-offs? And I think what was clear in the early days was that, yeah, because we could work remotely, even if people couldn't be in the office, they could still do something.

41:03Okay, great. When COVID started to get better and people could come back, many people argued, well, we should still have a hybrid sort of work environment because if I'm hybrid, I can want to work more. I have to commute less. I can be more with my family. I can spend more time with friends. There are some potential social benefits here too. And in many places, it seemed like that productivity in those workplaces had not been negatively affected. But here's, I think, the thing that we really underestimated, which is the impact of hybrid and work-from-home scenarios on social connection in the workplace.

41:36And one of the things that I've written about, like in my book back from 2020, is that when people are lonely in the workplace, and the surveys usually ask them a question like, do you have a best friend or somebody you can really trust and confide in in the workplace? When they are lonely in the workplace, it negatively affects their engagement, their creativity, their productivity, and ultimately has impacts on retention. And this is based in part on work that Segal Bar-Said from Wharton University of Pennsylvania did years ago and others. And so I think the part that we have not mitigated for, even today, I think in the workplace, has to do with how do you replace or strengthen or intentionally build social connection for people who are in a hybrid or completely remote situation.

42:21So I recognize the benefits of hybrid work from home scenarios. us. But I don't think we've mitigated enough for the harms. And there are ways to do that, but we've got to do more of it. As the boss here at Semaphore, this is music to Ben's ears. He's loving to hear this. It's for your own good. Exactly. But to kind of continue to focus just on COVID here for a little bit, during the pandemic, I remember you'd sent a letter to the social media platforms asking for information or trying to pressure them a bit on misinformation on their platforms. There was a lot of conversation at the time around Joe Rogan and COVID misinformation that he was kind of putting out on his podcast, the biggest podcast in the country by far.

43:02What was the impact of that? And do you think that that worked, putting pressure on the platforms around misinformation or maybe not? Well, so there were two things that I did in office around misinformation. One was to issue a Surgeon General's advisory on health misinformation to talk about the impact of health misinformation and what each of us could do, not just social media companies, but what healthcare systems or universities or workplaces, what individuals, what we in government, what we could all do to help reduce the spread of misinformation. The second thing that I had done was put out what's called an RFI or a request for information.

43:35That is a public request that's issued that invites the general public, and that includes companies, individuals, healthcare systems, which were very important in this case, to all submit ideas, information, data that they may have that may help us more deeply understand the impact of health misinformation, where it's coming from, how to address it. Those are public voluntary calls, by the way. And my office, the Office of Surgeon General, we don't have regulatory or a legislative authority. So what we ask for, what we request, what we say in the public doesn't come with requirements per se. I do think that one of the things I had said in my health misinformation advisory was that all of us, including social media companies, have an important role to play here in trying to reduce the spread of misinformation.

44:24It doesn't mean in the case of a social media company that you need to censor people. But what it does mean is that your algorithm makes decisions, right, about what to amplify and what not to amplify. And if your algorithm is amplifying health misinformation, and that's having an impact on people's lives, then that's something that you need to think about and take some responsibility for. And so, again, this whole discussion sometimes can get conflated with a question of free speech. But when it comes to social media platforms, it's not about allowing people to say something or not. It's what the algorithm chooses to amplify because the algorithm ultimately determines what we see, what the majority of people see.

45:06And that's an act of choice that's made by the platform.

45:09Max:But you have, I mean, And this turned into like a huge political disaster and kind of ongoing rolling mess, which has, among other things, ended with the end of all attempts to tamp down bad health information on social platforms. Like, do you think you guys screwed this up in retrospect? Well, I mean, I can speak for what I mean. Obviously, in all good faith, but it just doesn't seem like this worked out particularly well. Like, people are getting vaccinated less than they used to be. It doesn't seem like the information quality is real high. Well, I agree that we still have a lot of problems with health misinformation, and I've been very worried about vaccination rates declining, which was, you know, I think has been, vaccines are one of the greatest public health success stories that we have, and many people are not benefiting from that now.

45:52To be clear, the vast majority of people still do believe in the science around vaccines still get vaccinated, but the numbers have been dropping. I mean, look, I can speak for what I did for my office did in terms of putting out an advisory to warn people.

46:08Max:I don't mean to sort of technically put you on defense about that advisory. I mean more broadly the administration that you were part of sort of efforts to. And I think you're right. Like it's often cast as this sort of very kind of binary censorship program. But it was certainly an attempt to pressure platforms to not spread advice about hydrochloroquine. But then also it was certainly interpreted as suppressing debates about how well masks worked and things like that. I can tell you what we did, what I did, and what our office did. And there was never a circumstance where, you know, we were endorsing, you know, people's speech being squashed.

46:46Like what we were asking for is for everyone, including social media companies, but not exclusively. But social media companies, health care systems, doctors, educators, all of us. we're asking for people to step up in a moment where health misinformation was spreading like wildfire and ask themselves what they could do to help. And that meant like for individuals, a lot of people, like without bad intentions, will share things on social media or through their WhatsApp thread because they think it's real and they want to make sure that their friends are okay and that they know this information, even though it might be completely incorrect and they don't know that.

47:23So we would like encourage people, for example, to think about what the sources and unless they were sure that it was true to not spread it because it could inadvertently be causing harm. With social media companies, what I recommended in my advisory was for them to, number one, to even look at their own policies. The social media companies, people forget this, they actually had policies around misinformation. Whether they choose to enforce that or not is a whole separate question. But my concern was that the algorithms themselves, that was something they could control. Like a social media company may not be able to control what people post, and that's fine.

47:59They may choose not to, and I understand the importance of free speech. But there were choices they were making around what their algorithm amplified. And that's a choice, again, that, and I'm not an office that made laws or, you know, or issued penalties or couldn't do anything like that. But I do think what I was calling for was for people to think about the moral obligation they had to try to protect their users and the public. My hope, and perhaps this might seem naive in 2026, but I don't think it is, I would like to think that there are companies out there that will do the right thing, not just because it's required by law, not just because they're going to face a huge financial penalty if they don't, but because it's the right thing to do.

48:45And that's what I was asking for companies, hospitals, schools, individuals to step up and do. So Vivek, what we've talked a lot about today is the kind of individual actions that you or I could take to become more informed consumers and posters, the actions that companies could take to create a healthier environment that doesn't foster this kind of loneliness. But what are the actual moves that the government could take or states or the federal government could take to kind of, in your view, to kind of push back against this loneliness and these mental health problems around isolation? I'm glad you asked, because I do think there's something government can do.

49:22With that said, I think the most important actions that we need to take are actually outside of government in what individuals and organizations choose to do. But since you asked about government, I think here's what government can do. We know that government can, in a way that no private institution can, can accelerate research in a field. And I think more research funding to understand even more deeply the causes and solutions to loneliness, as well as consequences, I think would be helpful. I mean, the second thing the government can do is a very powerful convening ability, the ability to bring together different sectors around a common problem.

49:58And it can set a goal, a national goal for us to address. In this case, it could be a goal around reducing loneliness levels across the population and particularly among youth. It could be taking certain measures of community and strengthening those over the next 10 years, making that part of the goal we set for the next 250 years of our country and then marching toward that decade by decade. In addition to sort of the convening, the shining light, et cetera, government has a really powerful role to play in stitching together the different facets of the government itself. Like we think about, okay, you and I have been, three of us have been talking about health and loneliness in part from a health context.

50:34There are major economic outcomes, educational outcomes from loneliness and isolation. So the question is like, could the forces that shape labor, education, defense, health, all work together in Veterans Affairs in a collaborative way to ensure that we are embedding measures to strengthen community and connection in all of our policies and programs. That is an integration of sectors that few can do as effectively as government can. Whether the government chooses to do that is a separate question. But there are people like Chris Murphy, for example, a senator from Connecticut, who cared deeply about this issue.

51:11And we worked together. When I was in office, he's put forward some legislation as a starting point to try to get government to lean in to the importance of building community. And lastly, I should just say this, the one thing that's encouraging to me is this is actually not at all a partisan issue in a time when so many things feel like they're polarized. In fact, many of the people that I worked with when I was in government, And many were Democrats, many were Republicans as well. I remember traveling to Alaska with Senator Dan Sullivan, where we talked about the impact of technology on mental health, where we talked a lot about social isolation and loneliness, and we did these public events.

51:53I do think that people across the board care deeply about this issue. They may not necessarily know how to solve it, but I think when we look around our lives at the people we care about, the people we work with and live with and pray with and play with, we'll realize that many of them are actually struggling with a sense of loneliness. And there is something we can do about that. And that's one of the things I'm focused on in this phase of my life is how do we stitch back the social fabric of our community so that all of us can be healthier and happier? I wanted to ask one thing specifically before we wrap up here, which is RFK Jr.

52:29has been kind of trying to approach the mental health and loneliness crisis in a slightly different way, but he's been trying to approach it, which is kind of going after SSRIs, antidepressants, basically saying that, you know, these are making us more mentally unhealthy. I am curious what your thoughts are on those efforts to kind of tackle mental health and loneliness by kind of going after specifically these antidepressant medications and kind of blaming them. I always worry when people pick one thing and then try to assess full blame on that. that's just generally an issue as complex as mental health.

53:03That's generally not the full story. In this case, it's not. I think what we need to do a lot more of is understand and try to address what the root causes of our mental health crisis are. I think when it comes to treatment, we also have to look at access to care, which is really poor for many people across the country. Think about so many parents I meet with who have to wait months and months to get a mental health appointment for their child. And as a parent, to see your child suffering and know that there's nothing you can do and you can't get them help, that is an awful, awful feeling to have as a parent.

53:36So these are important issues for us to address, and I would love to see more done there. When it comes to how we treat depression with medications, look, I have long said that I think our approach to care in general has to be holistic. We have to recognize that there's a role for medicine at times. There's a role for therapy at times. And there's a role for thinking about the environment that we're living in, particularly the digital environment. And there's a role for thinking about our community and connection, all of which impact our overall mental health outcomes. So I certainly welcome conversations about any of these dimensions, but I generally don't find it helpful when we try to pick one and make that issue the villain, because that generally doesn't tell the whole story.

54:23In the case of medication, are there people who need to be or benefit from being on SSRIs? Yes. Are there some people who are on it who perhaps shouldn't be on it either because it's not helping them so much or for whatever reason? Yes, I'm sure that's true too. That's true with all medications. So SSRIs, we should treat like any medication. We should be thoughtful about when we start it. We should be thoughtful about when we stop it and we should make sure that it's helping people more than it's causing any harms. But that doesn't, I think, absolve us of the responsibility of looking more deeply at issues of access, looking at how we build social supports, and how we address the fundamental drivers of our current mental health crisis.

55:04Well, Vivek, this has been a really fascinating, interesting conversation. Thank you so much for joining us here and helping us, you know, kind of understand some of these things a lot better. Of course, it was really good to speak with both of you, and thanks for having me on. Thank you, Vivek. Thank you.

55:49Max:Make this the year you turn potential into performance. Visit thinkwithgoogle.com.

56:00So Ben, I have picked up over the years of working with you that you have very interesting and sometimes contrarian takes on the people who are freaking out about the ways in which the internet is warping our minds and changing kind of who we are. What did you think about the Vick's kind of warning here about the ways in which social media is leading to isolation and kind of a lack of understanding and how that's impacting our society in a negative way? Did you buy it?

56:29Max:Yeah, I mean, you know, as you suggest, my impulse is to be skeptical of this stuff. And I do think if you sort of read the research, it is overplayed. I mean, and as he sort of conceded, it's something where it's sort of directional. And if you're trying to give a medical warning, you should probably err in that direction. But that's a little different from it being totally settled science. That said, I do think it's increasingly hard to argue that a bunch of social changes around isolation birth rates aren't at least correlated with the rise of mobile phones. And, yeah, so I don't know. Maybe I'm just playing devil's advocate a bit.

57:00Max:Actually, the thing that really freaked me out about this the other day, I was asking my son about how AI was sort of changing his and his friends' lives. And I don't think they seem to be perfectly fine on the human romance front. But the thing he said that made me really sad was that homework used to be really social. Homework was when you call your friends and somebody's good at math or whatever and you compare notes and you help each other. And now AI has totally replaced that and homework is now really a totally solo thing to do. And that actually made me pretty sad. So now I think I agree with Vivek.

57:31Yeah, studying together, it's definitely something that, you know, some of us nerdier kids used to do. I also have a feeling that maybe some people, in fact, many, many people did not ever really care that much about homework and won't miss doing it with their friends or otherwise. I mean, that's a really nerdy thing.

57:48Max:It's your overachieving kids. Yeah, and I think there is this thing of like if people really are falling in love with AIs and replacing human romance with it, that is unbelievably disturbing to me. But I sometimes think that it's also that kids are figuring out kinds of interactions that maybe are going to be native to this generation that's grown up with these tools and that they're going to see a bit differently than the way we see them. And that, I don't know, I'm a little – I'm maybe more open-minded about that. I don't know. How freaked out are you? You know, I see the ways in which my own behavior has been changed by spending time on my phone.

58:19And I think it's less even the kind of content that's flowing to me in adults. I'm smart enough. I feel like I'm mature enough to handle some of this stuff. It's all the stuff that I'm not doing because I'm on my phone that I think is where I maybe most agree with Vivek. I'm not reading books to deeply understand people. I am enjoying endlessly scrolling instead of calling a friend on the phone the way that I used to and the kind of social connection that used to be formed because of that. I don't really have long phone conversations with people anymore the way that I used to. So I think I buy more what's not happening because of the phones necessarily than what is happening on them.

58:59Max:Yeah. I mean, I think the big question, a way it's something that comes up on this show all the time, is this question of what I think academics call media effects and the extent to which, you know, is media just sort of a reflection of society or is it really like drive, are shifts in media, the sort of Marshall McLuhan thesis that shifts in the nature of media are just profoundly reshaping society. And I guess, I kind of honestly go back and forth day to day a bit on this, but I think if you look at politics, I mean, there's a quite complicated writer Richard Hanania has a new book out about populism.

59:30Max:That's just ex-racist. Yeah. Complicated is maybe the nicest way to describe it. kind of right-wing apostate has a book out about populism that I was reading, and his, like, just sort of states very clearly his view that, like, 100 % of the shift toward global populism, it's not that elites have gotten worse, it's that the media has changed, that this new kind of media has created this new kind of politics. I think I buy that. And I think, you know, which is to say that we're living in an age that's massively reshaped by changes in media. They're not just kind of happening on the margins and reflecting sociopolitical shifts.

1:00:05Max:So I don't know. I mean, And I think that's Vivek's view. I just think it's mostly remarkable that someone who spent his entire life focusing on public health and, you know, the biggest problems facing our country on the health front is spending his time outside of office primarily focused on, you know, something that doesn't necessarily have to do at least directly with physical health. And it's really all about mental health and loneliness and isolation and how we're thinking about things and, you know, the types of steps that we're taking in that regard. I think that that's truly remarkable.

1:00:36Max:Yeah, obviously a very thoughtful, interesting guy. So thank you for tracking him down. Absolutely. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media. Our show is produced by Manny Fidel with special thanks to Josh Billinson, Amber Olley, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Daniel Haift, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tori Kaur. Our engineer is Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Steve Bone. If you like Big Signals, please remember to follow us wherever you get your podcasts and feel free to leave us a five-star review. And if you want more, you can always sign up for Semaphore's media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.