#1080 Kimberly Ho Misiasek On How To Raise Intelligent Children

Kimberly Ho Misiasek is a Clinical Child Psychologist and a Professor at The University Of Miami In this conversation we talk about nature vs. nurture, the exposure to adults, the impact of Covid lockdown & mask mandates, how the digital age effects children growing up today, and how to avoid raising a spoiled kid. ======================= BCB Group is the leading payment services partner for the digital assets industry. BCB Group provides payment services in 30+ currencies, FX, cryptocurrency liquidity, digital asset custody and BLINC, which is BCB’s free, instant settlements network for the BCB client ecosystem. Find out more by visiting bcbgroup.com/pomp ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. Ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more. Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U. S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= Don't miss Mainnet, the most anticipated crypto event of the year, September 21-23 in New York City. Join 4000+ crypto builders and thought leaders for 3-days of can't-be-missed keynotes, fireside chats, demos, networking, and more. Get $300 off of your pass today by visiting https://mainnet.events and entering promo code "POMP" at check out. See you this fall at Mainnet 2022! =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Dr. Kimberly Ho Misha Shik is a clinical child psychologist and a professor at the University of Miami. In this conversation, we talk about how to raise an intelligent child, including how child psychology develops, nature versus nurture, the importance of exposure to adults versus other children, what the impact of COVID lockdowns, mask mandates, and school shutdowns has been, and how growing up in a digital age changes the way that we should think about children, including their exposure to violence, trauma, and many other topics. We end the conversation with one of the most popular questions I hear people talking about

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  at private dinners, which is how do you raise children without spoiling them? Everything in this episode is simply personal opinion. None of this should be taken as professional advice from Dr. Misha Shik, neither from me either. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope that you enjoy it as well. It opens up a lot of things to think about, and hopefully it will be valuable for each of you that is a parent starting to raise children. Let me know after you listen to the episode what you think, and enjoy this one. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Dr. Lee Misha Shik here with me, which I hopefully pronounced that correctly.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  You did.

• 1:24Anthony Pompliano?

  First place I'm going to start is child psychology. Everyone knows that brains don't end up getting developed, for at least males, 25 years old or so. And there's a 25-year period from birth to that point. How should we think about the development of the child's brain and kind of psychologically how they develop through their infant years into childhood and then teenage years? Like, is there a good framework that parents or people could think about that development process?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  That's a great question, Anthony. Development is a child development is a time of rapid brain development. As you mentioned, it's a long process. The prefrontal cortex part of our brain, which is a thinking, planning, organizing, multitasking, creative thinking, problem-solving part of our brain does not develop until we are about in our mid-20s. That said, though, there are specific critical periods of a child's development that if they don't have an environment that nurtures that that brain development, it can be very it can can go haywire. So some of those critical periods are the early infancy, childhood years

• 2:39Speaker 01

  from zero to five. But let me let me pause here and say, so you asked about different frameworks to think about development, right? So then there's ages and stages, infancy, toddlerhood, early childhood, school age, latency age, adolescence. Then there's different ways of that they can develop in different domains. So there are, there is cognitive development, right? Their thinking capacities. There is also physical maturation. They can socioemotional development, personality development. So what would be helpful to start with, given this so broad?

• 3:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's start from really young ages, right? So maybe like the zero to five, kind of early birth. One of the things that I think becomes big debate is like nature versus nurture, right? And as with most things in society, like the black and white is probably not the right framework. There's probably a lot of gray. But just given your experience and a lot of the research that's out there, like, how do we think about if a parent has a child between ages of zero and five, like, what are the things they can do to increase the cognitive development or accelerate it? And then maybe what are the things to like, avoid that we know for sure, like, hey, this screws up kids if they're, you know, either exposed to certain environments, or the parents are doing certain types of things?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Okay, great. So that's a great place to start. So zero to five. So thinking about development in that area, you know, in terms of cognitive development, when you're, you know, infant, zero to one, there's a lot of, you take in the world with a lot of your senses, you know, so you see like sucking, you know, there's a lot of breastfeeding that goes on, there's like a lot of attachment building. And the kids, infants, start to learn what's called object permanence. For example, is a hallmark between zero to one that, you know, if ma- then an object will still exist even if it disappears, you know, that an object is still there. So if you, you know, if you're, you know, dropping your child at daycare, they know that mom or dad will come back.

• 4:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  So that's one concept that unfolds over time from zero to one. And then, you know, to toddlerhoods, you hear about the terrible twos, a time when their, their, their will and their control and, you know, I, I want to do it my way, you know, sort of comes online. And that is so as a parent to help support that you'd want to help them, you know, not be too over controlling, kind of, of course, you have to control if they're going to run onto the street or something like that, but you want to give them choices, like, what would you like to wear this or this today? Finding ways to build in some of their unique interests that are coming online to, to support that.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  And there was a second part of the question that you had asked.

• 5:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, when you think of what to do, I, I generally look at it, you know, most people know I've got a, a young nine month old daughter and I already can tell a couple of things. The first is allowing for the exploration and all of this. It just, you can tell like she's figuring things out.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And the first time she like learned to pick something up and put it down and like, like, it's like, cool, right?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Cause and effect.

• 5:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. A friend told me, he's like, you're going to rediscover the world through the eyes of a child.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I see that. But also there's probably things that parents should not do between the ages of like zero to five. And some of it, I categorize as like the overly ambitious parent of like, you're trying to push your kid too much to do things. So like, are there things there? And then also just like things that could just be detrimental to their development as well. What are some of those things?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Okay, great. And I think I just recalled you mentioned the nature versus nurture debate. So I want to also make sure I answer that. And so, you know, as you know, for nature, though, we're referring to things like our genes, right? And the thought was that once those genes are there from, that you've inherited from your parents, that is set in. Stone and that's what you're going to become and dictate who you are. And then the nurture, uh, the nurture side of things is the environment experiences, right? And fortunately, this debate has been put to rest. We know, as you said, that things are not black and white, that it's a combination of nature versus nurture, nature and nurture. And it's a field called epigenetics.

• 6:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Which looks at how the environment shapes which genes and when are expressed. So this can be easily, um, as an example, in the field of toxic stress, for example. Or when children face prolonged periods of, of stress, um, constantly are, you know, bombarded with domestic violence. For example, in the home or food insecurity and things like that. And they don't have the buffer of a parent of a caregiver to buffer that stress. That's when we know things, the brain architecture, the development of our brain and our neurons and the pathways can then, you know, lead to poor outcomes.

• 7:33Anthony Pompliano?

  What happens in this, you've done a lot of work here on, on children and kind of being exposed to various stressful situations. Especially in development, like if a child is unfortunately exposed to these stresses, what is, is it literally the chemistry in their brain is changing?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, the physiological profiles, the chemistry in their brain, because when, when, when you're stressed, right? You have the fight or flight or freeze coming online. And so your body is pumping cortisol, is pumping adrenaline and those hormones makes the blood vessels send, send blood to your muscles, your extremities. And takes away from the brain. So your brain is not really developing and forming as it should. Kids who have been exposed to toxic stress, their amygdala is always in looking out for danger. That's the amygdala looks for threat for fear is the fear part of our brain. And the prefrontal cortex that we talked about earlier is not coming online and it's not sending back messages saying, I am safe. Calm down, you can rest, you can digest everything.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  So everything from physical health, you know, diabetes, heart disease, it's like you're, if you, if your body was a car, it would be like, it's constantly revving that car engine. And there's a lot of wear and tear and stress. Stress in the body. So not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, cognitively, all those things. That's why it's so critical for the early period.

• 8:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What's fascinating is, it immediately jumps to mind. I have somebody that I met and they were explaining to me that babies could be born, obviously to parents who are addicted to certain types of drugs. And the woman who was telling me this, her parents had actually adopted a child who was addicted to meth because the parents had been, or the mother had been on meth. And what she said to me, which was fascinating, was there are a number of examples where actually physically, these children are what society would deem as like ripped, right? And their physiological structure appears to be different from a cosmetic standpoint.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's because actually while they're in the womb, they're so stressed out 24/7 that there's almost this like a flexing that's happening. And so, again, understanding that that's not my specialty and I'll take that at face value, that there's some directional truth to that. Is the same thing happening with the brain as well? Both, you know, in the womb, if the mother is stressed and then also in the early years, if the child itself is stressed?

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. When we look at things from prenatal, how the mother was during pregnancy, you know, if she was involved in a stressful, interpersonally violent relationship, we look at that. All those things, you know, because the fetus is developing and, you know, all the, you know, the heartbeat, all those things. And also when you're born, you know, I think, I think the research says that by age three, 80% of the brain is already the size it's going to be as an adult. So it's a very, very critical period. And you had mentioned with the meth examples, it's similar with alcohol, fetal alcohol syndrome, like.

• 10:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And are there things that moms can do? So if there's mothers or fathers that are listening to this that are about to have a child or they are pregnant today, are there things that the mother can do to have less stress, which then will have a positive impact on the cognitive development of the baby? Or is it cognitive development is really only affected post-birth?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Great question. I think just even from, you know, the condition and the the mental state, the emotional state of the family, of the parental relationship, the stability of that as well is something to look at. And of course, there's also intergenerational things to look at as well. But, you know, trying to, yes, you are your, you have to keep that instrument in tune, right? And take care of yourself. So as much as you can take care of yourself, kind of stay less stressed, you'll be more be able to tune to separate sort of what is my sort of anxieties and uncertainties from my child's and not project that on to the child, for example. And I'll stop there and say, maybe

• 11:37Speaker 01

  if there's any, like, when we talk about things that parents can do, are there maybe certain, certain distinctions that we could talk about, maybe?

• 11:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and, you know, when my wife was pregnant, one of the things we kept hearing is like, hey, if the mom is not stressed, then the baby will be calmer. And to some degree, you're like, ah, that sounds a little like woo woo. Like, sure, maybe, you know, hindsight bias makes you feel better about it. But it does feel like if, you know, I don't know, all of my friends who have been pregnant, some of them were really, really stressed out, not necessarily just because of the pregnancy, because of work or other situations. And some were very calm. And it does feel like the experiences were different to some degree. And I do wonder, you know, how much of an impact on the child does it have?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, we're talking about the stress when I talked to earlier about like the prefrontal cortex and the McDowell is firing. I think that is when it's like prolonged, unbuffered, chronic type of stress, when you have those changes. But say a little bit of work stress that the mother had, you know, but the child is born healthy and fine, and there is minimal sort of, some stress is good, you know? Children develop through these conflicts that they have to resolve at each stage. So some stress and a certain level of anxiety is good. It pushes us to go to get to the next developmental stage, right? So it's, I think what the distinction is when you have that prolonged Unbuffered, you don't have a stable supportive caregiver relationship,

• 12:59Speaker 01

  caregiving relationship to help you process things and kind of understand the world. That's when things can go awry.

• 13:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when we look at this like nature versus nurture, like what are the parts that genetically people agree in the scientific community, like, okay, these are the genetic things and whether they're kind of turned on or exposed or expressed, you know, early on versus later, like this is genetic versus like, are there specific things that are nurtures, a specific and not necessarily relying on genes?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  That's a great question. And I know researchers are studying things that at the gene level or the cellular level, for example, like telomeres, for example, you know, in kids who have been exposed to chronic stress and trauma, those become shorter and those things, those then, you know, shorter telomeres means shorter length of life, right? And then as far as nurture, on the other side of things that, again, it's that supportive, I know I'm repeating myself a lot, but it's that supportive caregiver relationship with that attachment relationship with you and your child, that that will help them sort of get that resiliency to bounce back from things.

• 14:04Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the pieces of advice that I've heard repeated over and over again is just like, the best thing you do for your kid is love them. And it's kind of this weird thing. It's not very quantitative, right? It's not like a prescriptive, okay, I do A, B, and C every day and like, we're good. How important is that? And are there ways that maybe a kid who's, you know, zero to five years old versus like a teenager kind of feels that differently? Or is it pretty much the same thing of like, literally just care and you should be okay?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, such a great question. And love is a great concept. And, you know, there's different ways to describe love. And, and I, you know, speaking here as a parent myself with two kids, and then also then I could speak from a psychological perspective. And, you know, when you think of love and you're thinking about attachment, which is about, you know, the relationship and bonds with a significant caregiver or romantic partner. And you think about attachment, again, there's a study, you know, the Harlow monkey, the rhesus monkey study, where they had, they took some rhesus monkeys, infant ones that were just born and put them with Wire monkeys, a wire monkey with a bottle, and then a wire monkey with a terry cloth, a soft, kind of cuddly terry cloth.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  And the baby monkeys, whenever they were scared or frightened, well, first of all, they spent more significant time cuddling up with the terry cloth monkey. But even though the other one had food, so they would just get the food and then head back to the other monkey. So that attachment, that love is important. And then, sort of speaking from a personal hat, a person of faith, for example, you know, love, loving your kid, loving your spouse, that parental love that you model in the home, that love and self-sacrifice, that self-donative love, is a good context and foundation that children can then develop socially and prosocially in. Like, where are kids' first educators in that?

• 15:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And speaking of education, there's a million toys and software and all kinds of crazy stuff that I've seen. Some friends have, you know, they swear by, others are ads that you see on Instagram or whatever. But they all promise something similar, which is like, we can accelerate the child's cognitive development, we can keep them on track. Is this all real? Is it bullshit? Like, how should parents think about a lot of these supplemental things? And, you know, I don't know, if I ask my dad, he's like, back in the day, no one had any of this stuff, right? And like, everyone turned out okay. Like, how do you think about that from a psychological development standpoint?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Another great question. And again, I'm not a person that throws like the baby out with the bathwater. I like kind of moderation and balance. And I think technology can harness a lot of great learning opportunities. It can hasten learning, for example, in some ways. But those same, you know, it can create contact with, you know, with people around the world that you wouldn't have had opportunity back in the day to have. And so, those, I think some of those same Those same characteristics that that that make technology so great can also be its downfall as well, just the instantaneous instant gratification, right? Social media, you know, you have kids, as you said, spending more time on their tablets and

• 17:19Speaker 01

  their phones than being out with friends, having face to face conversations. But as far as the toys question, I think you had mentioned for especially young kids, when you think about like an iPad and you think about a young two year old just passively sitting there kind of watching what's being fed to them, you want to look at toys that you as a parent can have what's called the serve and return type of building that reciprocity. You have joint attention, you have the eye contact, you're saying, I see you, I see the things that, you know, oh, you heard the bird in the sky that just flew overhead, I see it too, you're labeling them, you know, the things that they can see in the world, you're having them with you narrating the things you're doing, washing the dishes.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  So toys, you know, that like puzzles, building blocks, those types of things are, they still have a good place.

• 18:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so really, it almost feels like active versus passive becomes like a big differentiator between the things that the kids do. And it sounds like maybe it's not the extremes of like, it has to be 100% active or 100% passive. Instead, there may be a time and a place.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I think everyone's gone to a restaurant and seen the parents like.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  I need to eat.

• 18:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Here's the phone. I swore I wouldn't be that parent and then like, here's the phone, kid. Right? Yeah. It feels like that doesn't necessarily, you know, destroy all of the progress that's made elsewhere.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:41Anthony Pompliano?

  But maybe the majority of time you want in more of an active.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Learning experience. Yeah, absolutely.

• 18:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And talk a little bit about, you mentioned describing the things that you're doing or kind of labeling these pieces, like what is going on with the child, especially kind of five or under, like what is going on with the cognitive development as to like why it's important to almost talk to them in that way?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, talking with them, you know, they don't have the language yet. So kind of hearing, modeling is from these continued structure and routine and playing with them that they end up. Then building up the capacity to do these things. So I was talking about the the stages in the beginning, like zero to one, that sensory motor stage. And then the next stage would be, you know, their minds, a child's mind is so different than an adult's mind. So, you know, when they're like two to about six, they have, for example, what's called like magical thinking, like they think that because they wish something, it's going to happen. And they're very egocentric in their thinking. So they don't take the perspective of another person. For example, it's like why when I'm playing

• 19:43Speaker 01

  hide and seek with my, my, my daughter, and she thinks that when just because she puts the blanket over her head, it means that I can't see her, or she hides, and she's hiding in plain sight. And she doesn't know that I, I can see, you know, I can see her. So.

• 19:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's because she can't see you.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yes, she thinks that I can, yeah. Or it's like if I have a boo boo or something, and she's like, oh, here's take this stuffy toy, it's gonna make you feel better. You know, like, the ways that would comfort her is the way that would comfort me as an adult. So they're very egocentric. I see you have a question.

• 20:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, and I guess part of that is, there's this famous study that says, lower income children will actually hear 30 million less words than their higher income peers by the time they reach kindergarten. And we don't think, you know, if we sat here and already counted how many words we've spoken in this conversation alone, it'd be a lot more than we probably would guess. But 30 million words seems so drastic of a swing between high and low income children. It sounds like a huge piece of this, like talking to the kid, right? And engaging with them.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Engaging them, right. And then reading to them, providing, you know, opportunities for them to, to, I think, I think though, a lot though, is that interactive piece, because you can talk around them, you could talk, like they could be hearing you peripherally talking, like, say, we had a child here. And, but I think, again, like, it's that interactive piece of talking with them, talking to them, and also trying to avoid the, the motherese kind of babbling, like, like, talking, talking regular sentences as you would, so that they, they don't kind of end up with that baby kind of talk, you know, you want to speak in regular words, so that they can hear how the regular word would sound.

• 21:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And is this like you treat the kid, maybe not like an adult, but you treat them like a human that you would have a regular conversation with and then they will develop faster? Or not so much and maybe something else you're optimizing for?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, not so much. I think though, I mean, there's a place for like the big expressions and then like the eye contact. I think, I think it's when they're starting to learn to speak at a, at some point, you just want to make sure that you're just, you're able to say words that, that won't then, they will learn that are, that are the regular ways of our language or our English language. Yeah.

• 21:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And then what about multiple languages, either at home or, you know, at school or whatever? I know some folks who, the parents both speak English, they're native English speakers and they have an aspiration for their kid to learn another language. They put them into specific school settings. I know the opposite end of the spectrum, which is English as a second language in the home. And so the parents will say, hey, you'll learn English at school and you'll learn whatever the native language is here at home. How does multiple languages and the exposure to that at an early age develop the like cognitive abilities of the child as they get older?

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. And I know researchers do study sort of the effects of learning two languages and when a child begins to talk or even IQ and academic achievement. The one thing I remember taking away from some of that literature is that, you know, those who are bilingual or trilingual or learn many different languages, they have greater cognitive flexibility. As you can imagine, you know, they're switching between two languages in their brain and two types of maybe cultural contexts as well. You know, if, you know, you're from, say where I'm from in Jamaica, for example, or in the US, you know, there's a different sort of context as well that comes, comes online. So there's a, there's the benefit of having cognitive flexibility when you speak multiple languages.

• 23:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And something like cognitive flexibility, like if you walked out on the street and you asked a random person, like what is that? They'd be like, I have no clue, right? Like, sounds like a smart person thing, right? It's kind of like the general reaction that you'd get. How much of a parent's kind of activities can be? Dictated around like, I want my kid to be high IQ. I want my kid to have cognitive flexibility. And it's like almost intentional versus some of these things are just merely the result of a great, loving environment that's stable without a lot of stress. And it's not so much prescriptive. Like, can parents specifically say like, I want my kid to have a high IQ? And so let's do A, B, and C? Or is that wishful thinking? And maybe parents are over optimizing.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  So that's one thing when you mention IQ, that is something kind of determined a little bit by like endowment, like kind of what you're born with, a little bit of an innate thing. Although, you know, intelligence itself, it's a hot, you know, it's a very hotly debated construct. But if you think about the definition of intelligence as reason, the capacity to think, to reason, to solve problems, to, to be able to put together knowledge in novel ways. You know, things like that, those things can be obviously fostered. But when you think of IQ specifically, as it is in a psychological sense to be measured and through tests, that is something that is sort of more endowment.

• 24:45Anthony Pompliano?

  This episode is brought to you by FTX US. They're the safe, regulated way to buy and sell Bitcoin and other digital assets. Trade crypto with up to 85% lower fees than the top competitors. There are no fixed minimums, no ACH transaction fees and no withdrawal fees. Download the FTX app today and use referral code POMP to earn free crypto on every trade over $10. The more you trade, the more you earn. Go download the FTX app today and use referral code POMP. This episode is brought to you by BCB Group. With a dedicated focus on institutional payment services, BCB Group provides business banking, cryptocurrency and foreign exchange market liquidity for many of the world's largest crypto engaged financial institutions. The BCB business accounts allow businesses to load fiat currency and cryptocurrencies

• 25:29Anthony Pompliano?

  for payments, operations, and trading purposes. BCB's Blink network is the European crypto industry's first instance settlements network and one of the first real time payment networks of its kind to allow free real time transactions across fiat and digital currencies. BCB's vision is to empower the global financial revolution through sustainable and innovative banking. Find out more by visiting bcbgroup.com/pomp today. BCBgroup.com/pomp.

• 25:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Somebody recently was on the show and they basically were like, look, people don't like to hear it, but like, intelligence is very much genetically driven and kind of inherited and all these things. Now, you can do things to kind of move within some band around the starting point, which does mean that you have some control, you should do the right things, whatever. But unfortunately, you know, that's just one of those things that you're not going to jump from 100 to 160, right? And so, the dark side of this conversation, I think, is like, if you look at the numbers in the United States specifically, but probably globally as well, but I'm more familiar with the US numbers, the decline of like, the nuclear family is pretty well documented.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it, although unfortunate, fair to say, hey, as we see that decline, there will be changes to cognitive development and childhood development in the families where there isn't two parents with the kind of loving, supportive, stable relationship that you're describing?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  That's something I think about, you know, a lot, having gone through parenthood myself and having to work at the same time and just coming from, you know, exposure to other countries and knowing what their sort of parental leave policies are, for example. And there's that saying that the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that will change the world or move the world. And, you know, it feels like, at least in this country, that there's just, nobody has time to rock who's in the cradle, who is growing up the babies, you know, in the cradle right now. And like you said, the digital age with technology, there's kind of babysitting with the iPad and things like that. So I definitely think about that. And just, you know, just thinking about policies in place, even as one thing, is parental leave and just having time, you know, to adjust.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  You know, in Canada, it could be up to a year or two of paid parental leave that you can get. But here, I think it's six weeks or something.

• 27:42Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like there's a spectrum of like, we'll call, and again, just for lack of better descriptive word, like, the traditional two-parent household, right? With one of the parents going to work and the other staying at home. It happens to be usually the wife was staying home and the husband was going to work, but could be in any form or fashion. That...

• 28:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Next step or evolution of that is both parents working, right? And maybe less time with the kids or whatever. But then there's this like very extreme version, which is, you know, the, again, I think unfortunate, but quintessential example of like the single mother who's raising three kids and works two jobs. And unfortunately politicians on both sides of the aisle like to point to that as like, that's who we're trying to help. But it feels like that environment is different and distinct from like, oh, both parents work, right? There's still two parents in the household and yes, maybe they're not spending as much time as kind of the traditional model, but it's a very different situation when it's, you know, a single mother working two jobs and has three kids. How do you think about the development of the children in these different scenarios?

• 28:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And is it almost like a trajectory change in their cognitive development? Or is there a different way to think about it?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  I mean, you can think of examples of people, right? Who grew up with a single parent, right? Who still go on to have academic success or music success. I'm thinking about though, in the third example that you gave, you know, and if it lends itself to more opportunities for children's issues, right? To be, to go unnoticed, right? Or, you know, you're less in the care of your parent, your caregiver. And so I know it takes a village, though, to raise children, right? There's the role of aunts and uncles and grandparents, of course, a lot of grandparents in these cases. And, you know, I think if it does take a village, but we want to make sure that there's somebody

• 29:39Speaker 01

  at least that they're connected to, somebody that has an eye on, you know, you just don't want them to be alone with unhelpful. For example, if they faced abuse or something like that, you don't want them to be alone with that. You want to have an eye and, you know, be able to say, hey, what's going on? Hey, what's wrong? Notice changes. But when everybody's so busy, everybody's so busy working. Things go unidentified and then you have long-term poorer psychiatric outcomes.

• 30:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's fascinating about the scenario, and if you kind of use hindsight as a crutch here, there are people who are successful based on a bunch of different aspects who come from, you know, the traditional two parents, you know, one stays-at-home model to single mother or father with multiple kids and multiple jobs. And so I don't think that it necessarily prevents the outliers, right, in either one of those scenarios. I think the conversation that I see people having is more so like, what's the average, right? And if you go back to whether it's, you know, a kid hears 30 million less words before kindergarten, or you look at certain family structures or kind of childhood experiences, it just makes it harder.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think the people who end up being the outlier, they actually point back and like, that's why I'm successful.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Because I experienced this early on and it drove me, it motivated me, it did whatever.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there a way for the parents in those situations, can they do certain things to help with the cognitive development, even though maybe they don't have the kind of supportive, stable environment that you're saying is like, okay, that's option one, right, in kind of the ideal scenario? But are there certain things that either research or people have come across where it's like, if you're a single parent, here are some things that you can do. It may not be time, it may not be the ability to sit for two hours and talk to the kid, but there are certain things you can do that can at least have some impact?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, so that question, it makes me think, you know, I mean, that, you know, you ensure that, you know, they're going to school, they're taken care of, like medically, and then at a certain point, sometimes, you know, like school, when they reach adolescent age, you know, the peer group becomes a very big part of their world. And so just, so if I'm getting it right, you're asking me if in each, in the middle ground of these two situations, is there a way that parents can foster optimal cognitive development such that some of these people can also reach to the heights of, say, a somebody who said that, well, it was this environment that made me who I am. I have grit, I have determination, I have the capacity to some, extract the good things from my environment and then enact those.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Is that kind of

• 32:10Anthony Pompliano?

  If you think so, there's many stories where people have been successful coming from less than ideal scenarios and what I've always found fascinating is usually the way they tell the story and again, you know hindsight, you want to make it seem like this heroic journey. But there's somebody, whether it was, hey, I had a single mother and they always told me that I would be successful or they instilled a certain level of confidence or they explained, hey, we don't have what everyone else has. But like, we have the ability to work hard to eventually get that or there's always something that seems to come from that environment where they're able to latch on to it and fortunately or unfortunately, there may not be one answer, right?

• 32:54Anthony Pompliano?

  It may just be, hey, you're dealt the cards that you're dealt and you have to help the kid develop as much as possible. But it sounds like what you're saying is it's not just the family, right? There's also school, there's also friend groups, like there's other pieces that help to influence the development of the child as well.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah, there's different, it's actually a good, it's why I went into the field of traumatic stress because I was, you know, growing up in Jamaica and seeing children sort of begging on the streets. But then you hear the heights of music fame, for example, with Bob Marley or the Usain Bolt, like sprinters and, you know, great thinkers. And you're like, what is it in that environment that that's still, you know, despite not having all the means, that still allows them to thrive? And I think those are, that's why I went into the field to study, like, what are the resilient?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Is it spirituality? Is it like a just a belief that, you know, you know, even though hardships are always going to be there, but I can still succeed if I, you know, if I just give my all or is it, you know, you plus your talent, you know, I just, I think there's, I think that question is to be answered, to be answered on my research.

• 33:54Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you evaluate it today? Like you've already been studying it for some time. I don't think you'll ever say like, okay, finally I figured it out. Let me go to a different field.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:01Anthony Pompliano?

  But how do you evaluate what what you've at least learned so far?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  About resilience, especially in childhood. I mean, again, I sound like a broken record here. But it is really that strong sort of parental buffering, helping you sort of make sense of.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Unexplainable, for example, events that happen in our world. But firstly, I mean, as a parent, if you're a child, you know, you do go through some something catastrophic as a school shooting, right? The first thing as a parent should do is to listen. They need, they don't assume that you know what they know, what is distressing to them, or what is even the most distressing thing about the school shooting to them. You want to be able to listen with an open ear and appreciate, you know, their experience and their feelings and not just rush to try to put a Band-Aid and solve it and say, everything is gonna be okay. You want to sort of validate and appreciate their experience and hear what it is that really impacts them. Or, and you know, you can ask that through like, what are your friends saying? Kind of open up the conversation, what, so that it's not as personal.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  You know, sometimes they don't want to feel like they're out of control. They're like, no, I'm fine. But you want to say, what are your friends saying? What are they talking about, about this? So kind of being a good listener, kind of getting to know what's on their mind. Also taking, you know, your own temperature on, on, on the event and getting supportive if you need it, whether that's from a spouse or your parents or a church person, kind of getting your sort of stability back and so that you'll then be able to then listen and understand and help them make sense of what's going on.

• 35:34Anthony Pompliano?

  So if we move from like the zero to five to now kind of what I'll call school age, I'm sure that there's a much more scientific description, so kind of elementary into middle school. The things that immediately pop to mind are obviously there's, you know, bullying that goes on and things that I would categorize as like, they've been going on for a long time at that age.

• 35:54Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the research there show in terms of things parents can do to help kind of their kids navigate it? And how much of it is just like, hey, you're gonna deal with this and it's better just to listen versus be prescriptive in some way?

• 36:06Speaker 01

  You're right, you know, bullying has gone on for a while or roasting or however you want to call it. And then it feels like the online way of it has just, you know, can be 10 times, hundredfold worse. And the question, you know, you know, social media, thinking about a social media account for a school age child. I mean, well, obviously, well, 13 and under because of the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act, they shouldn't have an account. They don't allow you to have an account. But thinking of, you know, Understanding, so what are my child's friendships like right now? Right? Is it filled with drama? Well, then imagine that online is gonna be even worse. So, you know, I guess I'm getting at the question like, when can they have these digital tools to use responsibly? Are they able to commit to you?

• 36:51Speaker 01

  So I would imagine that family sort of technology plan to develop with, you know, your teenager or your adolescent on what are the expectations of the use? How long can you have it for? What are the consequences if you, you know, you break the boundaries of this plan? What are the hours that you're able to use it from? Can they, can they follow that contract with you? And will they be responsible enough to use that and have an account?

• 37:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So with this family technology plan, is this like a parent sits down with their kids?

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's like a negotiation?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Kind of like, yeah. I mean, although you probably would want to have more of the structure of it. But you can make them feel to have some empowerment.

• 37:32Anthony Pompliano?

  We call it a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  I know.

• 37:37Anthony Pompliano?

  That is, that is definitely what that conversation seems to be like. But, but when you, when you do that, you mentioned a couple of things. What are the types of things that are the most important there? Is it just like, hey, here's what you can do with these tools, whether it's social media, cellphone or whatever? And here's what you can't? Is it more a focus on like the punishment? Like if you had to pick one or two key components of that technology plan for a family, what goes into that?

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Definitely not the punishments. You know, even with punishment with kids, it doesn't teach them what they're supposed to do, right? So you want to lay out more of here are the things that you can go on. But in terms of what you can't do, I would say just more in terms of like, I'm thinking of like location sharing and just things that would put you in, put their child in danger. But it's more of the expectations around use. You know, you can use it maybe for two hours before dinnertime, none during dinnertime, what sites you agree that you can visit, things more, more of what, what your expectations around the use are, unless on the, on the punishment. But they do need to know what the consequences of it are in advance so that you can, so then you don't have to like in the moment be like, ah, I think, well, you'll just, you know, you're grounded forever. Or you're gonna take it away for 10 years, you know, kind of thing.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  You want to have it just, that you can just say it and you know, you know, the consequence, we agreed to this.

• 38:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And that goes back a little bit to treating them like a human.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Like an adult to some degree. How about?

• 38:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Their friends having access to certain things and them not, right? So when I think of elementary school and middle school, one of the like biggest areas of people being bullying, it's like what clothes they wear, you know, who's cool, who's not type stuff. But also I remember being in high school and cell phones started to become popular. And my parents maybe would wait just one year, right? But like a lot of my friends got cell phones, maybe freshmen in high school or something. And I had to wait till I was like a sophomore. And I remember this is like, this is the worst punishment in the world. It's like, look at that cool thing they have. High school is probably a little bit different than if you're in second or third grade or whatever it is. So like, how should parents think about, not just like, hey, should my kid have this technology or not?

• 39:40Anthony Pompliano?

  But are there things to be considered of where maybe other parents are actually giving their kids technology, whether it's cell phones or social media accounts? And if your kid doesn't have it, does that open up any sort of issues or things to be aware of?

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, good for your parents. I know there is research to suggest that the longer you wait, it is better, you know, like they had, they had a study, I think between nine and like 12 year olds. Nine was too early, 12, the longer you wait a little bit, the better. But I hear what you're saying. It sounds like the concern is if all their friends have a phone and they're connecting over, you know, texting or having a group chat and you're, I mean, from your personal experience, did you like, were you left out of some things or did you?

• 40:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it was more so the phones back then, you could play snake. Like you could play snake and there was T9 texting. So you tried to do it as efficiently as possible.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. It was my smartphone.

• 40:36Anthony Pompliano?

  But to the degree, uh, yeah, it was like, uh, you definitely were like, hey, I want one of those. And, you know, you come with all the nonsense excuses like, mom, you know, don't you want me to be able to call you after school and make sure I'm safe?

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 40:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And she's like, no. But, but I think that today, part of this is, you know, the communication of kids, obviously you, you see, you know, Instagram, Snapchat, you know, Twitter, all these different things, Tik Tok, whatever. But also just texting, like, like that is a way that kids communicate in, um, uh, kind of their everyday life that yes, adults do it as well. But if we had text message, text message groups at nine years old, like I actually am glad I didn't grow up with that as an option, right? Because I don't think that that would have been probably a good thing in hindsight. But a kid obviously doesn't know that today and they want to participate. So how do parents deal with that?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's, you know, like you said, the social media, people have Instagram, Tik Tok, and it's all sort of ego based. It's like your highlight reel of your life. And then you will, you know, you'll be scrolling for ages comparing yourself to people's highlight reel and that can cause obviously anxiety, depression. I mean, suicide is the second leading cause of death in adolescents 10 to 14 in this country.

• 41:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I did not know that.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  The first one is accidents.

• 41:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Accidents and then suicides.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Suicides. And it's growing in the nine and under population.

• 41:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And what is driving that? Is it the social media? Is it?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  That I'm not sure of. I'd have to do some more digging. But it is growing and for adolescents is the second leading cause of death. So really, you know, you're asking good questions, right? Because you can really get into very serious waters here with our children. And, you know, I think, yeah, just the online space, there's a lot, a lot to unpack. And I think if you can, you know, have that first strong attachment with your, with your child, be a good listener, have them develop that relationship with you to communicate, to tell, you know, what's going on? You have a kind of pulse navigating then the technology years in adolescence will be a little bit easier.

• 42:40Anthony Pompliano?

  How important is it to teach your kid that being different is good? Or like, okay? Like, to some degree, I just think of it as if you reinforce, do what everyone else does, follow what they're doing. In some ways, you're exasperating the if you're different or if you're left out, like, it feels like it's more severe, like the feeling. Whereas if you've taught your kid from an early age, like, being different is usually a good thing, right? If everyone goes right, sometimes going left actually can be valuable. Or if everyone is thinking one thing, no, actually thinking for yourself could be valuable. It feels like that just maybe dulls some of the problems where like actually if

• 43:24Anthony Pompliano?

  everyone else has a phone and I don't, you know, what's the opportunity that I have versus feeling like I'm left out?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's almost sounding like you're doing what we call like a cognitive reframe about the situation, which is, which is great, you know, and like being different, you know, there could be upsides to that, right? You know, you're thinking differently and it's, it's about how you, yeah, you think about your situation and not get too one sided or extreme. And so like even as a person myself of like mixed races, you know, thinking about being different, yes, you feel a little bit like, okay, I cannot relate to everything that everybody, you know, who maybe are more like homogenous, but then I have, you know, I can draw from different cultural worlds and that's, that's okay too. You know, there's a place for that as well.

• 44:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Alto IRA. They can help you invest in Bitcoin and crypto in a tax advantaged way. That helps you preserve your hard earned money. Alto's crypto IRA lets you invest in Bitcoin and over 200 other different coins and tokens, and it has all the same tax advantages of your traditional IRA. There's no setup or account fees, and it's all you need to do. Invest in crypto tax free. Let me repeat that again. You can invest in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies tax free. So are you ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto crypto IRA to invest in Bitcoin and crypto tax free. Go

• 44:44Anthony Pompliano?

  to altoira.com/pomp. That's A L T O I R A dot com slash pomp. Start investing today. This episode is brought to you by Bullish. They've reinvented the digital asset exchange. They give you access to DeFi features like automated market making and liquidity pools in a regulated environment. It's a whole new way to generate alpha. Bullish's total trading volumes have exceeded $25 billion just in the seven months since it launched. And their industry leading order depth means you can trade confidently when you want, at scale with better pricing and lower risk, all within a regulated market environment. Good reason to be bullish. Learn more at bullish.com/pomp and follow at bullish on Twitter today. Another thing that comes to mind in kind of this like elementary into middle

• 45:29Anthony Pompliano?

  school, kids can start to read, all right, thankfully. But everything's so digital today. And I don't know if you've ever seen, there's like, almost like comics, or, hey, you know, 50, 100 years from now, the human evolution, like, we're all gonna, it's gonna be these huge-eyed things from staring at screens all the time, right? And our necks will be slumped over, and kind of the very dystopian view of the future human race. But today, is there a difference? Like, if you have a kid who sits down and reads a physical book versus reads on a cellphone or on a laptop with the digital screen, like, are there studies or research that shows, like, no, actually,

• 46:11Anthony Pompliano?

  the physical book is better, or maybe the digital kind of consumption method is better? Or do we not yet have enough information to really know what the difference is?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  That question, I don't know the exact science, but I can think about ways where technology could be helpful for kids who have trouble reading, they need those read-aloud stories on the iPad, for example, that could be helpful. But then, you know, obviously, with the paper book, you have that tactile, you have that tactile opportunity to touch the page, to turn the page, just a little bit more fine motor than maybe swiping on the iPad. So those are some differences. But I guess it also just depends for who, you know, if you have special needs, maybe some help with the iPad, and reading aloud programs would be beneficial.

• 46:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And along these lines of reading, I think most people in the business, finance, technology world, they're like, I want my kid to be smart, right? Which, cool, everyone has pipe dreams. There's gonna be a natural distribution of intelligence. But one thing that is definitely kind of intertwined in society is people who read are smart. And whether there's, you know, truth to that or not, most people I know want their kids to be intelligent. So they'd say, hey, you should read, you should read, you should read. Are there things around the reading? Like if, from a childhood psychological development, should a kid spend more time with other kids? Or should they spend time reading?

• 47:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, if your kid is like the extreme and kind of like the quintessential nerd, and just sits inside all day and reads, like, to me, like, maybe that's not actually that great, because you actually do need the social interactions. But being 100% social and not reading at all. And so is this like a classic, just like, everything in moderation probably is the best strategy?

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think when you're seeing, when parents want their kids to be smart, you know, there's book smart. And then there are other aspects of life and functioning that outside the classroom, like if you're in a work environment, how good of a colleague or a team player can you be? Right? So there's these social skills that they need to develop that they can, you know, only develop with others, right? With their peers, taking turns, knowing boundaries, you know, empathizing with the feelings of others. You'll get that from playing. And then, of course, you know, when you have time to read and stretch your imagination, that there's a place for that too. And there's a place for even adult scaffolding

• 48:41Speaker 01

  to help children accomplish more than what they're able to do without adult assistance. There's a researcher, a Russian researcher called Lev Vygotsky, who talks about the zone of proximal development. So helping that, what, it's basically that zone between what I just said, what a child can do without assistance versus what they can do with a more learned caregiver or teacher. So yeah, I think it's, again, having all these variety of opportunities to read, to play, to play, to socialize, to bond with an adult. All these things come together.

• 49:12Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the pieces that it feels like in adolescence that can really help with the maturity of everyone is being exposed to many different ideas, many different cultures. And so you'll hear all the time, people will say, oh, kids who traveled a lot as a kid, or as an adolescent, maybe even in the college years, they tend to have a more worldly view, right? And then that's, I mean, that they're more intelligent and just like, they've been exposed to different things that others haven't. Is that a similar phenomenon when you're a kid, like you just want to expose them to a lot of different things? Doesn't mean they're traveling, but you want them to read, you want them to play, you want them to do all these different things and that kind of accelerates the cognitive development as well?

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Um, I wouldn't say it accelerates the cognitive development, but you've just given them opportunities to know that there's, with the traveling, that there's a different way of doing things and there's the way of the country that I come from, you know? It just expands, like you said, their worldview and that there's no, you know, cultures around the world develop in, you know, different norms and different values and that makes them, you know, just a more informed citizen. And so, yeah, just having your child, I think what you're talking about is maybe like a well-rounded sort of child when you give them these opportunities, right, to read or to play.

• 50:26Anthony Pompliano?

  There's been a number of books that I've seen that are basically written about this idea of, uh, most people want their kid to be a specialist, right? So it's kind of one of the examples is like Tiger Woods. His dad was like, you're gonna be a golfer at, you know, two months old, like, watch golf, swing golf club, be good at golf, right? Uh, and obviously went on and is greatest golfer of all time. But actually, that is the outlier story compared to most people who end up being great at something, take more of a generalist approach and then focus later on in life. And so it sounds like from a childhood development standpoint, actually the generalization and general experiences may be a better path.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then looking at, but I mean, you know, there are, there are prodigies, you know, there are things that you can observe in your child to see if they're, that they're developing a talent and then you want to support that, you know, if they're great at art, um, or they, they have a musical inclination, just kind of seeing what they're good at and giving them the opportunity to, to, to, to, to learn that, master that and take that.

• 51:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What about the role of sports? And sports to me is always this like interesting thing where, uh, there's the parent who like, my kid's gonna be in the NBA. You're like, eh, probably not, but like, okay, you know, good, nice dream and maybe there's some bonding between the child and the parent. But it does feel like there's lessons learned from playing organized sports, whether it's hard work or teamwork or persistence, you know, all these different things. Any thoughts about like, is there a certain age where that stuff is more important? Should, you know, certain types of sports that end up being valuable?

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. Like you said, sports, you learn the teamwork, you have to have discipline. You know, my sister was a swimmer. You'd have to get up in the morning before school for practice and then after school again for another couple hours. And yes, there is ages that, you know, it would be beneficial to have kids start to do an after school activity, like six to 12, I'm thinking of that age, that stage, I'm sorry, where they need to start having mastery over, over an activity or something that they can do, you know, to feel like they've, you know, they've mastered something. It's, you know, they feel industrious, you know, they've mastered, like you said, a sport. And like you said, with sports, there's that team aspect, learning how to take losses,

• 52:42Speaker 01

  you know, also, you know, not to, I'm thinking of like when sports teams and they have this like big ego as well, that can, you can want to diminish that a little bit. So yeah, yeah, it's great.

• 52:52Anthony Pompliano?

  It all feeds into it.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then what about spending time with kids your age versus spending time with adults? Like, there are kids that I know who, they're probably in the 10 to 14 range, they're kids of friends of mine. And you talk to them and you're like, you are not a 10, like, you just socially are able to communicate. You shake my hand, you look me in the eye. Like, there's very specific things, the way that they have a command of the language, the things they talk about. You spend time with a lot of adults, it seems like, compared to another kid who, you know, is running around. And again, these are extreme examples, but it feels like they spent way more time with kids than adults. Is there like a perfect formula? Or is it just, again, general well-roundedness and you want them

• 53:39Anthony Pompliano?

  to spend time with adults, you want them to spend time with kids their age as well?

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know if there's a perfect formula. Um, but you know, equal, I think they're both equally important. If you have, you know, an older adult who can have stretched their thinking, stretched their abstract thinking and things like that, that's very helpful, you know? And then if you, you know, you have your, you know, if you don't, like you said, if you don't have a peer group and you sort of feel like left out, isolated, disconnected, that's going to burden you as well. And so you want to make sure that you also balance that with peers your age.

• 54:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And in that, it feels like when kids hang out with each other, there's like many different settings that they can do it. So obviously, school is a huge one. There's things like sports or whatever. How important is it for them to hang out with each other outside of like the organi? You know, school is very much, especially in today's day and age, like sit in the classroom, be quiet, we're going to teach you. And maybe there's recess or lunch or something. But almost like free form hanging out, like how important is that?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  I think that's good, too, you know, to have some unstructured free time with your friends. Of course, you know, also at that age, you're also doing after school activities. Like if you were involved in violin, you'd probably be continuing to do that. But you don't want to over schedule your kids, you know, in so many activities that they just don't have time to be and be who they are with the friends, you know? You want to have a balance. It's always a balance.

• 55:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. If we go into the school, all kinds of crazy stuff happening. There's seems like it's getting politicized. There's people from all different angles who think they know what's best for all kids. And so like the first thing I always caveat the conversation with is like all the kids aren't the same. And so there's probably different ways that certain kids develop or what would be quote unquote, good for them.

• 55:27Anthony Pompliano?

  But maybe the first thing is just like, when I think of traditional school today, I always think of it in a sense of like, it's prison for kids. And what I mean by that, it sounds bombastic, but it's like, we tell the kids to go somewhere, be quiet, sit down. And it's usually a very one way kind of lecture. And again, as you get older, it becomes even more and more kind of the teacher is teaching you and you're there to sit and learn. But that's not really what the kids want to do. That's not how kids act. They've got tons of energy. They want to run around. And if there wasn't this mandated school, they would probably not be doing any of that. They wouldn't be sitting down quiet anywhere.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And so in some way, like, school is very counter to what almost feels like their innate desires. Does that help the kids? Does that hurt the kids? Again, is it just balance? And like, maybe the ideal thing would be like, they go to school for three days and they're out of school for four days. Or like, how do you think about that?

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I think that it always depends on the type of kid and what they need.

• 56:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  So in the traditional schooling system you were mentioning, you know, it's very structured. So for some kids, like, a very unstructured day, you know, someone with ADHD, for example, it could be very overwhelming, for example. And maybe the traditional schooling model lends itself to certain, the mastery of certain subjects a little bit better. But like you were saying, the shortcomings of a traditional school doesn't teach you sort of how to, and this is, again, I don't want to be too extreme, but maybe it's less likely than to help you to, you know, think for yourself and have that initiative, right? To take charge of what you're learning and does it apply to me? And kind of ask those questions and develop the skills to become sort of a leader in that type of way.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  I don't think, like you said, that the traditional school is sort of like, you know, you sit, you absorb type of thing, type of knowledge. And I think in some ways, you know, that structure, that routine is necessary in childhood because, you know, children develop off of that. And then from there, then they develop as they're adults, right? We need that sort of routine, structure, predictability in our world. But I think that, I think, but I think at the end of the day, it boils down to what the kids need. If you have special needs, if you're a gifted child, for example, you might need a different environment.

• 57:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, one of the most popular kind of education models in the tech industry is the Montessori schools. Some of that's because there's people who've built very large companies and they went to Montessori schools. Everyone's like, well, if I want my kid to do that, then let's go. Some of it is, no, actually, I think that's a better learning environment. So there's all different reasons people do it. What are the pros and cons of, you know, kind of a more structured, traditional system versus something that's more kind of the Montessori school? Like, hey, you know, the hallmarks of that type of education is like they address the teacher sometimes with their first name, not the Mr. Or Mrs. It may be more like, what do you want to work on today versus do this worksheet? Like, is there research or anything in terms of there's different outcomes for kids who

• 58:36Anthony Pompliano?

  go through the different models?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  I'm not aware of the different model research, but I think it just depends on the environment your child would thrive in. If they're like an independent sort of learner, thinker, self-starter, you know, they do well with that, then the Montessori education could benefit them more. But say to you, to your family, you know, you want sort of a religious education, you want a traditional school, like the values, like obedience, authority, respect, those things a little bit are more important to you, you know, then go with the traditional school. I think it's about finding the right fit. If you're not in the right environmental fit, that's when you can have problems.

• 59:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It's a fascinating way to think about like, it's kind of like company culture.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:18Anthony Pompliano?

  There is no good or bad culture as much as you can go to a company and the culture is the culture.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And some employees are like, I love it here. And other employees are like, this is the worst place in the world.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 59:28Anthony Pompliano?

  They usually quit, right?

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it almost feels like similar to what you're saying. Actually, for the kid, they may enjoy one or the other, or the parents may align their values with one or the other, and then that's the better way to think about it.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think a fit is the best way to think about it.

• 59:42Anthony Pompliano?

  When we talk about the schools, you mentioned ADHD earlier. The joke between me and all my friends is we all had ADHD. No one just knew to tell us it, right? As kids, we were rambunctious and we were constantly doing crazy things. And kind of my fear would be if I was a kid today, like they would have drugged the hell out of us and been like, oh, you guys all just need to sit here and basically not move.

• 1:00:06Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a joke, but like every great joke has a hint of truth in it. And it does feel like there's been an explosion of awareness and diagnoses of ADHD. Obviously, things like Ritalin and others seem to have drastically increased in usage. Whether it should be or should not, how do you think about the childhood development of kids that now we're actually addressing something that maybe in the past was just looked at as, oh, they're creative or they're energetic or whatever. And teachers kind of just dealt with it, you know, for lack of a better way. It seems like now there's like this pharmaceutical component that is pretty ingrained in school. Like, what have you seen there? Or how do you think about that?

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Um, you know, there are things that teachers can do in the classroom already to help kids with ADHD that don't hurt the other kids as well. You know, like having a daily schedule on the, on the, on the board. You can put that kid a little bit closer to the, to the front or something, giving them a little bit of extra time. There are accommodations that you can make in the school that don't hurt the other kids as well, that that benefit them too, you know? And you could also positive reinforcement at the end of the day, like here's the, here's the thing, here's the number of stars I got for each of the things that I, that I was supposed to accomplish for today. So, um, yeah, that's what I, I think I'll stop here and you can.

• 1:01:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it, it's fascinating. You mentioned like sitting in the front of the classroom and it's, it's a dumb thing. When I was in college, uh, I was playing football and the coaches used to say, everyone has to sit in the front row. Like, this is so dumb. Like, it's not gonna, like, why does it matter if I sit in the front of the back? Like, in hindsight, it definitely mattered, right? And, and some of it may have been just like the teacher can see if you're like screwing around or whatever. But also, for whatever reason, like you're just closer to the information.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And like you, you don't feel like you're like hiding behind the rest of the class. There's an element of like the classes behind you so they can see if you're screwing around or whatever. And so I do wonder how much of like the school environment, you know, this idea that like almost every classroom in America, for the most part, in the traditional school system is built the same way. There's a chalkboard or like a board, right? There's rows of seats and like, how much of your academic progress? And success is literally determined by like whether you chose to sit in the front or the last row.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Oh geez, that I don't, I don't, I don't know. I don't know that like.

• 1:02:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you might not have a right of like a quantitative answer, but like it does feel like there's, there's something.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  I would imagine that a child who chooses to sit in the front seat might be just more motivated and, you know, engaged and wanna be closer to the teacher and absorb as much as they can. So then it would kind of self-select sort of the students that, you know, end up doing better because they choose to sit in the front. And whereas the back, you don't have, the teacher doesn't have as much control, you know, and oversight over those at the back.

• 1:02:47Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it's, um, it also, it brings up this idea. Uh, we recently were talking, uh, about this idea of, uh, founder volatility. So people who start companies. If you almost think of, uh, volatility, so, um, if you have very little volatility, it's basically, uh, your behaviors and your outcomes are within kind of a very narrow band.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:03:07Anthony Pompliano?

  That's great if you wanna start, let's say, a small business. So you wanna start a restaurant or you wanna start, uh, uh, some local business, which, uh, traditionally the goal is just to make money, right? And you wanna have profit and kind of grow the business in a somewhat linear way. In the technology industry, you actually want exponential growth. And so the, the, uh, idea here is that there's a lot of outliers or you want the outliers. So in order to get outliers, you need volatility.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:03:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And so actually what happens is that, uh, the greater the volatility, the greater the potential outcome. But you can't take someone with very little volatility and get an outlier outcome for the most part, right? And so what that leads me to believe, uh, or, or think about is like when I was in high school and middle school, there's always the teacher who'd be like, I don't know what the outcome's gonna be here, but like, you are either gonna be super successful or you're gonna get in a lot of trouble. But like, you always knew who those kids were and they used to be the class clowns, the people who caused problems, you know, who, uh, uh, screwed around in the hallways or whatever. But if you extrapolate it out, like, there was a lot of volatility in those people. Like, some of them ended up not doing anything.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And some of them ended up being highly successful.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it almost feels like the school clamps down to some degree on the people who tend to have that volatility because they want everyone to be quiet, sit in the seat, you know, not be disruptive to the school.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Should maybe we be encouraging more of that and like saying to ourselves like, no, that's actually where some of our best business people or scientists or whoever may come out of that bucket of kids rather than the other?

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  No, yeah, I think that's a great example and a great question because, as you said, if you were to say, like, if I were to do a comprehensive assessment on you as a child and all your friends, and, you know, everybody has strengths and weaknesses, everybody, so when it comes to like measuring cognitive intelligence, for example, you know, that's a combination score, basically, of your verbal capacities, your verbal reasoning, verbal concepts, that's one. Then we have processing speed, how fast or slow you process information. We have visual spatial skills, like puzzles, right?

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  We have things like fluid reasoning, how good at you are at taking some novel concepts and just kind of making order out of just new information, abstract information. And so each of you or your profile, each of your friends have different strengths and weaknesses, and it's about harnessing that and finding out sort of, you know, like what careers and fields that will be good for, what the way you learn best, are you a sequential processor? Or are you able to take in information simultaneously and then just kind of make something novel out of that? So, understanding how these kids learn, understanding then how also their behavior sort of shapes,

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  you know, if in chunk, if learning chunks is better, those are things that a good psychological assessment could help you understand and figure out what fit then of a school should benefit you, would benefit you.

• 1:06:22Anthony Pompliano?

  This episode is brought to you by Compass Mining, the world's largest marketplace for mining hardware and hosting. With Compass, everyone can mine Bitcoin. You can do it at home or in one of their 23 hosting facilities around the world. All you need to do to start mining your own Bitcoin is go to compassmining.io today. Again, if you want to get into Bitcoin mining, go check out compassmining.io today. We interrupt this podcast to tell you about the most anticipated crypto event of the year. Messari's Mainnet Conference 2022 is happening this year, September 21st to the 23rd in New York City. It's three days of can't be missed keynotes, fireside chats, demos, networking, and more. They'll have folks like Ryan Selkis of Messari interviewing Ripple's Brad Garlandhouse,

• 1:07:06Anthony Pompliano?

  and that one is going to be absolute fireworks. They also have keynotes from Balaji Srinivasan and OpenSea's Devin Finzer. You can get $300 off if you go to mainnet/events. Again, just type in www-mainnet/events, use promo code POMP, and you'll get $300 off. I'll see you this fall at Mainnet 2022. And we've been talking about school from a traditional sense of kids go, there's teachers, the whole nine years. Over the last two and a half years, there's been some big changes in schools. So obviously, there was the school shutdowns where kids couldn't go to school. They were doing Zoom or whatever. I've seen screenshots on the internet where like kids were literally on their laptops in their bed while the teacher's teaching or whatever, right?

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Or not in school, not logging in and missing a whole year of school.

• 1:07:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And so like, I guess just like, let's start there with just the school shutdowns, which largely seem to be over now, but there are six months to some schools, 18 months, where kids were not physically going to the school. Like, what are we seeing now? Or how are you thinking about that from a development standpoint?

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, as you know, as we said before, we're beating a dead horse. But the school is a place where, you know, it provides a routine. You wake up in the morning, eat your breakfast, and then you go to school. Schools have that sense, give students or children that sense of routine predictability and stability. It also is a place where students would get some of their extra social services if needed, right? Or free lunches sometimes, you know, if you qualified for that. It was Place where you could identify, teachers could identify, for example, if there's abuse going on in the in the home. So when you have all these shutdowns and you have students not doing that, less face to face time with their peers, not like walking to class to class, you know, more sedentary lifestyle. You know, now, you know, we're seeing, you know, this youth mental health crisis that we talked about.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  And it's just been, it's been devastating. I'm glad that schools have reopened and then I know, and then there was a portion when it did reopen. But then when there was an exposure in the class and you had to shut that, or the people who are exposed for like 14 days, stay home. It's so much instability and unpredictability. So you said one, you know, 15 days you're at home, then back into school again. And then for the poor parents who, you know, had to work and if you had kids under five during the pandemic, you know, having to work and take care of you, it was just a special place in hell.

• 1:09:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, it's, if you ever talked to like your grandparents or were fortunate to talk to your great grandparents and like the quintessential, like back during the war, right? I feel like, you know, 20, 30, 40 years from now, people would be like, back during the pandemic. And the kids would be like, shut up.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But it is, it was very traumatic for parents.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  I was, I was, I was pregnant in the pandemic. I had the baby in the pandemic and worked and had another way. It's, yeah.

• 1:09:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and it's just a whole different experience, right?

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, different experience.

• 1:09:51Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the other piece of this is when kids went back into the classroom and still to, to this, to this day, many schools still require kids to wear masks in the school. And so at first I was like, well, you know, whatever the local ordinances are or whatever, like, okay, schools are just going to repeat that. But then I started to read about some of this and they were like, no, like a huge piece of learning to communicate with folks is like the facial expressions and seeing someone's mouth as they talk and like all these things. If you're a kid and you're seven years old and two years of the seven years you've been alive, you haven't seen people's mouths. Like, there could be development problems there, right? And so, again, I don't think we have all the information to kind of really understand this.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Anthony Pompliano?

  But how big of a problem, or how alarmed should parents be that, hey, your kid went to school for, you know, years at this point, literally with something over their face, and so did all their classmates and their teachers, and like, is that something to worry about?

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, I know, as you say, we don't have all the answers, and I'm not a medical doctor, so I can't really talk about like, the breathing or the respiratory effects of wearing a mask for two years for kids two and above.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  But, you know, it does, you know, on the outset, it feels like, you know, you're not seeing the formation of the mouth, the movement if you're learning to speak, and I know there has been some increase in speech and language services since the pandemic, they haven't directly related it yet to the masks. And I know there's also research to show that schools that did require some of the mask mandates were able to stay open a bit longer.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  But, and again, you know, as a parent, you know, and with a young child of two, having, you know, having him not see his teacher's mouth and his, I mean, I guess you can, you can see the eyes and you can see smiles, but it's not the same, and we don't know, we just don't know, we have to, we have to better understand that as our, as our, as our field faces this, this new sort of issue.

• 1:11:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and to me, we can't go back and change the past, right? It is what it is, it happened, whether you agree with it or not, that's where we are. I think the bigger question is, if this now becomes a crutch from a response standpoint to future issues, right, we've seen there is a monkeypox, right, that's gone, and all of a sudden, you see some states being like, oh, state of emergency.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And it just feels like, once you've kind of breached it, it's just like, let's go back to that thing, because this is the playbook, like, something happens, we go state of emergency, we do this. And if the part of the response be is, hey, everyone in school put on masks. And then it's just like every year.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Kids are putting on masks.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Now all of a sudden, like, the long term impact of this could be very, very important to understand.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think you were highlighting sort of a very reactionary response, a response sort of based out of fear. And we know when we respond to something, when we're overwhelmed or based out of fear, our thinking gets very narrowed. And we're not able to think, you know, flexibly and have a response that really requires what, you know, you can't assess the problem as good as you can if you're reacting out of fear. And so I think, you know, it's a time for, for, you know, leaders to come together and think about what are the concerns here? How, and if this continues in the long term, what should, you know, the response be thinking, you know, more so about children's development long term, going through this, absolutely.

• 1:13:12Anthony Pompliano?

  As we think about that development, I know that you've done some work on like children's exposure to violence in the United States. And violence can encompass a lot of things. There's obviously domestic violence. There's, hey, I was at a place where I saw violence occur, you know, in my community.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Unfortunately, there's violence at school, there's school shootings, things like that.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Help me understand a little bit better in terms of like some of the research that you've done there. And like, what are we learning about children's exposure to violence in the US in light of their kind of cognitive development?

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Yeah, there, you know, I think two thirds of children witness violence in the US.

• 1:13:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Two thirds.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, growing up. And, well, worldwide, 70% of people experience something traumatic. Fortunately, only about 15, 10%, I'm sorry, 15 to 20% go on to develop PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. So, yeah, I've done some work in the trauma field, child and family traumatic stress. And like you said, a traumatic event could be something where, you know, you witnessed the loss of life of someone, or it could be a domestic violence incident, or school shootings, suicide. And so trauma is, so it's this external sort of injury, you know, it's a Greek word for injury, trauma. And it sort of leaves the person unable to cope, overwhelmed, helplessness, horror.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  But fortune and there are certain signs and symptoms. Would it be helpful to share some of them?

• 1:14:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  So with the traumatic experience, some of the symptoms that we see is a lot of hyper arousal. So exaggerated startle, if you hear like a noise, you immediately kind of like you're hyper aroused, you're startled easily. We have some of the re-experiencing symptoms like the nightmares and the flashbacks and intrusive thoughts and memories. And then you have the negative alterations in cognition and mood. So you'll see here are things like the world is a bad place. All people are scary. I can't trust other people. I can't trust police. And then you have the, obviously some, some changes in mood. So depression, isolation, feeling, unable to feel positive feelings.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  And then you have the hall, one of the hallmarks of trauma is this avoidance piece. So not wanting to see or remember or hear things related to the traumatic incident, not wanting to go by, you know, at the school, for example, there's big avoidance cognitively and in person, like not wanting to physically see. So you have those symptoms that, that, that constitute sort of the clinical symptoms of PTSD, of post-traumatic stress disorder. And again, not everybody who goes through a traumatic event will end up with PTSD. But the earlier you can identify these signs and symptoms, the better, and match them with evidence-based treatments that work, the better we can put kids back on the path to recovery and normal developmental trajectory.

• 1:16:04Anthony Pompliano?

  What are some of the evidence-based treatments that kids can go through that, I don't know if it reverses or maybe just kind of dulls the effects of?

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So, so for, for say a kid was exposed. So there's different phases of the trauma exposure. So there's the acute phase, like that's the on-scene sort of response when you see police show up. And then there is a phase in between, in between that event up to 30 days, we call that peri-traumatic phase. And then you have the longer term phase a month and after. And so, you know, having trained at the Yale Child Study Center at the Yale Center for Traumatic Stress and Recovery, they developed a treatment for that peri-traumatic phase, for example, so right after an event and in the days and the weeks leading afterwards, that actually, children who go through that are 65% less likely to meet criteria for PTSD. So it's preventing the onset of PTSD. So that treatment is called the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention, also

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  known as CFTSI. But say it's been a longer time, like six months and out years. The other intervention for that, the evidence-based treatment that children can get is called Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, TFCBT. Those two are great evidence-based treatments for these specific periods after the traumatic event.

• 1:17:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And in the 30 days right after, like, what is going on in that program or that intervention?

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, if you think about the traumatic dysregulation, right, those symptoms that I hadn't explained, kind of repeating the experience of sense of loss of control. So it's not only the experience of the traumatic event, right, that's traumatic, but it's your symptoms, you're feeling personally out of control, you know, your body, your mind, the way you think, the feelings. That intervention aims for, is for children ages seven to 18. The aim is to help have a caregiver, a supportive caregiver, or a parent through, it's a family strengthening approach. It's basically to help turn the volume down on some of the symptoms, identify, first identify those symptoms, actually, which ones are the most distressing, turn the volume down on it, and to help the caregiver and the child communicate better about the experience.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  You don't go through, actually, the details of the event, you don't have to relive and talk about and debrief what happened, but really, it's how to help them sort of turn the volume down on those most distressing symptoms.

• 1:18:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And how much of this is only addressable after the fact? So, you know, let's go to the extreme and say a school shooting, for example, versus in the military where PTSD is quite prevalent. They tend to do, whether intentionally or not, a ton of what I'll call mental conditioning, but that's a very unscientific term, of during basic training and all these things, like they put people in hard situations, they seem to attempt to increase the mental toughness and all this stuff. Now, a school shooting is not a sense of like, hey, my kid should have went and played sports and like developed mental toughness, right? That there's a super traumatic event that seems to be an outlier, which is more akin, frankly, to combat or something like that.

• 1:18:58Anthony Pompliano?

  But then there's a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't seem as extreme, but still is traumatic or provides stress. And so is there an ability for parents to hope for the best, right? And say, hey, I hope my kid never deals with any sort of traumatic event or anything. But they can do things to increase, whether it's like the mental toughness or do things to help them be prepared in case they ever do encounter one of these situations? Or is really the only thing that we know so far that works is like evidence-based treatments after the fact, and that's where we can have some impact?

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  Okay, so you're asking if there's anything to do to prepare the child's functioning in the event of such a traumatic?

• 1:19:36Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, in the most layman's way to think about it, right? There are parents who are like, I'm gonna make my kid do hard shit, because like, the world is hard out there, right? And like, learning that lesson today in this like somewhat controlled environment is much better than like, let me coddle them and then send them off into the world and like, they get punched in the face, you know, metaphorically by like, the world. Do we know, like, if people are put into those situations before a traumatic event, do they tend to have more resilience and less of the PTSD kind of impact afterwards? Or is it really just this like, kind of 30, you know, 30 or six month?

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's definitely not the 30 days after thing that can, that sets apart, that can help recover, someone recover from PTSD. You know, we look at previous functioning, right? Prior to an event happening, and their sort of developmental snapshot of their developmental sort of status. Like, we want to know kind of what, what their life was like prior to this event, so we can know kind of, you know, what was, what was their normative functioning? And how is it then disturbed or distressed after the traumatic event? So, you know, if your child was, you know, you had a stable school life, you had a caregiver

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  who you could rely upon, they were engaged in extracurricular activities that they felt, they felt masterful.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  That they, you know, they, they were doing well in school already academically. All these things. And then after the event, if you have then a supportive caregiver to help the child, that most times they'll be, they'll be all right. So it's not about what you can really do to prepare. I think, I think what you're touching upon though, is that when a traumatic event happens, their world is sort of shaken and their thinking gets a little bit shaken as well. Right? Their thinking kind of, then they start to over accommodate their thinking to like, oh my gosh, like the world is unsafe and very scary. And so it's kind of helping them get back to a more realistic and helpful statement. If their world is safe, you want to remind them that the world is safe.

• 1:21:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I, it's, it's this weird conversation in society today because I think that it gets politicized. But if you kind of strip away all the emotional components and the polarization of it, to some degree, there is this undertone where a large portion of society feels like, oh, kids today are coddled and whether it's in the school system or by their parents or whatever. And there's like less mental toughness, right? Now, I say that from the sense of, I grew up in a family with five boys and like, a lot of disagreements got settled with our fists, right? And so like naturally, that's a very different environment. But if you just kind of revert to the mean, right? It's like, you don't want a society where everyone is coddled and like, basically somebody says,

• 1:22:31Anthony Pompliano?

  you know, mean words to you and your whole life gets derailed. But you also don't want, you know, I don't know, like ancient Rome warriors where everyone's like walking around ready to like kill each other. So like, there's some middle ground that I think as a society, we're like, cool, we want people to have some degree of resilience and kind of mental toughness, but also we want to be very cognizant of the fact that like, the kid who is sitting in a classroom, all of a sudden gunshots go off and somebody comes to their school, starts shooting, like, they are going to have to deal with shit, right? And, and not only the kids, like the parents probably as well. And so when we think about this, it feels, again, it gets politicized. And so it gets over rotated on both sides, but you know, a common theme of our conversation today

• 1:23:14Anthony Pompliano?

  just feels like, it's like the moderation. It's like, no, listen, you can in some ways be, I heard the phrase recently, demanding but supportive.

• 1:23:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you want to have the demanding aspect of like, hey, there is a real world and you want to be prepared for it, but also don't forget the supportive part.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like an authoritative parent. You know, you have the authoritarian who's very demanding, but the authoritative, I'm sorry, is one who you do have expectations, but they're also very warm at the same time. So you're kind of giving that both balanced.

• 1:23:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Authoritative parent.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Yes, versus authoritarian.

• 1:23:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting. Explain this more about an authoritative parent.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, you're just very warm. You're very, you're loving. You have an attachment with your child, but you also have expectations as well. And you're firm and consistent in the rules of the family and the consequences. You don't, you're not overly permissive, which is the opposite of authoritarian. You're just the kind of laissez faire. You can do whatever you want, kind of, yeah, if you want a car, I'll buy you one kind of thing. So the authoritative is the balanced one that we found is linked to better outcomes for kids.

• 1:24:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So it has this element of like, there's an expectation and to some degree, discipline or something is kind of laced into that. But also you're still the parent and you still care about the kid.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:24:30Anthony Pompliano?

  It's very similar to management.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  I'm sure there's a term in management, right?

• 1:24:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  What is the term?

• 1:24:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, I guess if you're a good boss, then you make a good parent, hopefully. Identity is another thing that you've spent a lot of time looking at. You have a very unique background in that you are Jamaican and Chinese descent. How does identity play into a child's kind of cognitive development? And like, is that something that the parent kind of dictates to the kid, like you are X and then they internalize it?

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  That's a great question.

• 1:25:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is it something that they just like?

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  So great question.

• 1:25:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Implicitly get?

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's so many ways to go with this. Okay. Well, to answer the latter question about does parents play a role into a kid's identity? I'm thinking about James Marcia's theory on identity development, which talks a little, which uses two sort of constructs on exploration and commitment. And when you cross the two, you get four outcomes. So I'm thinking of, you said there, like if a parent said like, Okay, like we're, you know, Italian or something. This is the this is the cultural identity you need to adhere to. And so you as a kid then to just accept that, you would be called in that's in that Marcia's four outcomes. You would be what's called in the foreclosed identity. So you didn't want you didn't do any extra exploration.

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  You're already committed to this Italian identity. And then if you but if you did like high exploration, so you were high, you know, you you looked around a little bit about. We've talked about careers, for example, right? You looked around and then you committed to this highly, you would be what's called the achieved sort of integrated identity. However, there's another identity status that could be very diffuse, like you you haven't committed to anything. And you haven't done an exploration, you kind of just kind of aimlessly there in society. You don't really have meaningful friendships, you know, you're easily swayed by different things. You don't really have a sense of self. And then this and then the third, the fourth and final one is identity moratorium,

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  which is you haven't committed yet to anything, but you're still searching, you're searching, searching a lot. So there's four types of sort of identity statuses on somebody's identity development journey based on exploration and commitment. And then forgetting the first part of your question.

• 1:26:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So like just take that as an example, there's four of these identity buckets. Is any of them better than the others? Is there like a design like, hey, we want kids to end up in bucket four?

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, bucket four, you know, the one about high, high exploration and high commitment. You know, you kind of feel like this integrated sense. Okay, I did some, you know, research, I looked around. I didn't just kind of take my parents' word for it type of thing.

• 1:27:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Kind of earned it?

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I earned it, I I explored things and I feel comfortable with this final resolution kind of thing. It was probably feel more comfortable. In my decision, and it's an informed decision, like I made an informed decision. I didn't just like sort of take what was like given to me. And then, you know, of course, some can be more anxiety provoking than others. So like if you're in a state of moratorium when you're searching around, you probably feel some level of anxiety, like looking for who you are. So then I guess if you then move into the achieved identity, you feel a little bit more, just a more relief.

• 1:27:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's fascinating about this is I can think of two different aspects of like identity, right? So like, let's take religion and maybe ethnicity.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And to me, my family's Italian, right? So big Italian family, like there's all of, every single thing that is a generalization, pretty much like check the box. Well, it's just, and by the way, every other large Italian family, for the most part, like, yeah, they eat a lot of pasta, they get pretty loud, right? Like all these things. But what's fascinating about it is you're told as a kid, like, you know, we're Italian, but it's not like, hey, when we get in a disagreement, everyone raise their voices, right? Or that is almost like a learned behavior to some degree. And every single other person I knew that was Italian, I would go to their house and it was the same thing. Like it wasn't a, it wasn't a thing where I was like, oh, that's weird. Like, it was like, yeah, of course, it's how families operate.

• 1:28:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And you only notice it once, then you would go to a friend's house who's not Italian. You're like, everyone's so quiet around here. So like, to me, that's like, almost like you're in an environment, you pick up certain things. And, you know, I have experience with an Italian family, but if you went to an Irish family or you went to, you know, a Chinese family or whatever, like there's certain things culturally that are unique to that culture, they pick up. Religion feels much more like you are told things. Where I have friends who are Muslims, Jews, Christians, the whole gamut. None of their parents were ever like, you should go out in the world and explore all these other religions.

• 1:29:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, that was not a thing. It was like, we are X, you will follow X rules, like whatever the religion was.

• 1:29:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And it feels much more kind of authoritative, like top down.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm going to take you on Sunday to church, right? Or I'm gonna take you to the synagogue or whatever.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there different parts of an identity that have these different interactions? Or is that just like us trying to make sense of the world that maybe we grew up in or experienced?

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  When you say interactions, what do you mean?

• 1:29:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, one's like explicit, like we are X religion and we've

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 1:29:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And as X religion, we do A, B, and C.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:29:56Anthony Pompliano?

  The other is more implicit because no one sits you down and is like, we do A, B, and C. It's just you kind of like learn the behavior a little bit.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:04Anthony Pompliano?

  As a child, does it matter which one? Or is it actually better to get both types of learning?

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I'm thinking of with with religion, for example, like you're right, like our parents. I mean, my parents didn't give me any choice either, being Catholic. But

• 1:30:21Anthony Pompliano?

  They're like, ah, you know what? You're Jewish people, you should go hang out with them, right?

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think it's a decision that I think that as parents, they have that authority to make. Now, when you get older, at least they've given you that experience and education that you can choose then, okay, do I want to still continue this because you are an adult? But I think if you didn't have that, because we, I'm thinking from just some of the psychological benefits that people who are religious and spiritual can, you know, can get out of kind of learning about duty, you know, caring for the vulnerable. And I have this thing with psychology, I feel like it's divorced itself. If you think of the word psychology, the study of the soul, the spirit.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  And in an effort to, I think, be more like hard science, physics, scientific, it's really tried to to separate itself from some things that are a little bit more like theistic. But when you're looking at who we're studying, like the human experience and the fact that many people in the world are religious, you know, or belong to a practicing religion. We are missing a big part of the picture with that.

• 1:31:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, I have one big last topic to talk about. This is a huge Open secret, which is whenever I sit down with other couples, my wife and I, and we are at dinner or at lunch, or we're hanging out with them, whatever. The number one topic that everyone always talks about, but no one wants to admit publicly, is they're all deathly afraid of raising kids that are spoiled. And this is everything from friends who they are teachers, to super wealthy, to immigrants, to people who are born in America. I mean, just like across the board. It seems like it is a deep-seated fear of parents,

• 1:32:17Anthony Pompliano?

  where they say to themselves, "My child is going to have a different childhood than I had." That's almost every parent's dream, right? Is, "I want my kid to live a better life than I had, or I want my kid to be happier than I had, or have things that I didn't have," whatever. And there are the extreme examples, right? I'll use a celebrity in Jay-Z, right? And I think he's openly talked about it. He has kids now, and he's like, "My kids are living a little bit differently than I did." And that's a good thing. He accomplished that as a parent. But then also, that same story is very true, right? I have a lot of friends who are immigrants, and they're like, "Look, like, I was literally born in another country, and I came here. My kid already just being born in the United States, I feel like they have a leg up, and they're gonna have this different experience."

• 1:33:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What can parents do to increase the probability, not guarantee, but increase the probability, that their kids don't end up spoiled, if they just are having a different childhood? Like, what do you see there from a development standpoint, and an environment standpoint?

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  That's a great question. And I think the way to answer it is to sort of understand what you think your friends mean by spoiled. What do you think they mean by, like, "I don't want to spoil my kid," when they say spoil?

• 1:33:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Every single one of them is different, obviously. But if I had to, in the most crude way, outline what they mean, they don't want their kid to be fucked up.

• 1:33:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, like, and I think what the fear, again, people just naturally go to the extreme, is you see an actor or an actress's kid, they're, you know, this young kid, and they become a teenager, and next thing you know, you read about them in like TMZ because they're addicted to drugs, or, you know, like, the very, very extreme. I don't think that's necessarily, they're like, oh, my God, I'm so worried that my kid's gonna grow up like, in the spotlight, because many of these people aren't public figures or anything. They're more so worried about like, will my kid work hard? Will my kid actually understand the importance of learning? Will they, you know, be ambitious? Like, all these things that I think society generally puts value on, how do they make sure that their kid

• 1:34:21Anthony Pompliano?

  gets those, instead, doesn't just become kind of a, you know, shithead kid who's like, oh, you know, my parents will take care of me?

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it sounds like, you know, being spoiled, and it's true, I was thinking about that, I was thinking about the one, the parents that give their kids anything that they ask for at any time, they don't expect much of them, it's the low sort of expectations to give back to their family, or to give back to society, so, you know, I think to prevent that spoiledness is to make sure that they have, you know, those opportunities to contribute to the society, to their family, because otherwise, when you, you know, you just give them things, give them things, and you have no expectation of them to do anything to give back, I think you can then quickly get to that root that you painted.

• 1:35:10Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's almost like, setting the expectation, like, expectation setting may be the single most important thing of making sure that the kid understands what those are, and also almost holding them accountable to some degree to try to meet the expectations?

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, holding them accountable, getting them involved in volunteering, or just what they do for, you know, chores at home, sometimes kids grow up with no chores, because, you know, you resented doing that as a kid. It's important not to do anything like, reactively, like, oh, you know, to be conscious and think about the, your parenting sort of strategy and your expectations for your kids, not as just as a reaction to what I don't want to do as, you know, as I had experienced growing up.

• 1:35:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I think every parent would be the world's best parent if their kid didn't have to make their bed, right? Like, that is the bane of many kids' existence, like, I gotta make my bed. And then I guess, as a part of that, like, My dad used to say this all to me, he wouldn't say it directly to me, but he would say it in front of me to people is he would always say, uh, my kids don't need another friend, they need a parent.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And it sounds very similar to what you're saying in terms of there's expectations, this like authoritative parent.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, this like, um, almost demanding but supportive.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  Supportive, exactly.

• 1:36:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Type thing fits very similar.

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And kind of weaves itself together where the parent should be the parent. And if you do that with any degree of success, like your kid should be okay.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah, should be okay. I mean, like you said, it's that balance of having, having expectations, you know, you being in control of certain, you know, for certain things. Um, and then, but you're also a warm, supportive listener, you know, you're there for them to, to hear things out if something's going awry. Um, you're just not, and it's, it's just, it's that calm, it's just not being that extreme sort of helicopter, I'm going to control everything you do because, you know, you have to ask yourself, what, what is driving that anxiety and fear? Is it because, you know, you don't want anything bad to happen to them? Well, you know, you have to prepare them that bad things will happen, right? Bad things can happen to good people, um, good things happen to bad people, um, bad people do good things, bad people do bad things, you know, there's just, as long as

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  they're not like having sort of an, if you're trying to control their whole world, um, and you know, sort of shelter them from every sort of, um, possible thing that could imagine, they're not going to learn the skills to manage it when it does happen and the world is going to be shattered.

• 1:37:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It, um, it, it feels scary, I think, to parents to kind of put their kid out in the world, but at the same time it's going to happen.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Can't slow down time?

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37:44Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. My, my last question for you is, uh, you are a, uh, a trained child psychologist or a clinical psychologist. You have two kids. What do you do with your kids that may surprise people or something that, uh, that you do with your kids that you feel is really important? That if you could tell all of your friends who had kids, like, hey, this is the thing I feel like is so important?

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  Okay. Great question. And I will, yeah, I. You know, a lot of the questions we talked about today was how to set our kids up for success, how to ensure optimal cognitive development across domains, and you know, how to set that up with their activities or with their friends, how do we provide enough to pay for like the best education that they can have, and you know, as a working parent too, you know, and I was well, thinking about all those questions that you asked me, having worries and concerns about those things, when I really, what I really think parents, you know, what I do with my kids are what also helps me is to really play with them.

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  Let's sit on the carpet and play with them and just be with them, be with them, play with them, you know, there's all that good oxytocin is flowing through everybody, that bonding, and you know, it takes you away from the worries of, you know, making money or being the best researcher you can be, and you know, they're also getting a lot of learning opportunities from you as that, again, attentive, nurturing, supportive caregiver, is just to play, to play, play, play, you know, peek-a-boo, hide-and-seek, be silly, have a blutify, pillow fight, jump on the couch for a little bit, you know, play with them.

• 1:39:32Anthony Pompliano?

  That's it.

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:34Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a, no matter how much we analyze all of this, it always goes back to the simplest thing.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  The basics, right?

• 1:39:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Like literally just love your kid and hang out with them.

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, but not be their friend.

• 1:39:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Exactly. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find some of your research if somebody wants to follow up based on some of the stuff we talked about today?

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  I think the only social media platform I have is Twitter. I have a Instagram, a Facebook, so I'm at Dr. Holmashashak, and I have a practice website, khmsychology.com.

• 1:40:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I know that a lot of people are really looking forward to this, and we'll definitely have to have you back in the future.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  Thank you, it was great being here, Anthony. Thanks for having me.

• 1:40:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode.

• 1:42:22Anthony Pompliano?

  The.

• 1:44:41Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Dr. Lee Mee Sha Shik here with me, which I hopefully pronounce that correctly.

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  You did.

• 1:44:49Anthony Pompliano?

  First place I want to start is child psychology. Everyone knows that brains don't end up getting developed for at least males 25 years old or so, and there's a 25-year period from birth to that point. How should we think about the development of the child's brain and psychologically, how they develop through their infant years into childhood and then teenage years? Is there a good framework that parents or people could think about that development process?

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  That's a great question, Anthony. Development is a child development is a time of rapid brain development, as you mentioned. It's a long process. The prefrontal cortex part of our brain, which is a thinking, planning, organizing, multitasking, creative thinking, problem-solving part of our brain, does not develop until we are about in our mid-20s. That said, though, there are specific critical periods of a child's development that if they don't have an environment that nurtures that brain development, it can go haywire. So some of those critical periods are the early infancy, childhood years from zero to five.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  But let me pause here and say, so you asked about different frameworks to think about development, right? So then there's ages and stages, infancy, toddlerhood, early childhood, school age, latency age, adolescence. Then there's different ways that they can develop in different domains. So there is cognitive development, their thinking capacities. There is also physical maturation. They can socio-emotional development, personality development. So what would be helpful to start with, given this is so broad?

• 1:46:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's start from really... Young ages, right? So maybe like the zero to five.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:46:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, kind of early birth. Um, one of the things that I think becomes big debate is like nature versus nurture, right?

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:46:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And as with most things in society, like the black and white is probably not the right framework. There's probably a lot of gray.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:47:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, but just given your experience and a lot of the research that's out there, like, how do we think about if a parent has a child between ages of zero and five, like, what are the things they can do to, uh, increase the cognitive development or accelerate it? Um, and then maybe what are the things to like avoid that we know for sure? Like, hey, this screws up kids if they're, you know, either exposed to certain environments or the parents are doing certain types of things.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  Okay, great. So that's a great place to start. So zero to five. Um, so thinking about, um, development in that area, you know, in terms of cognitive development, when you're, you know, infant, zero to one, there's a lot of, you take in the world with a lot of your senses, you know, so you see like sucking, um, you know, there's a lot of, uh, there's breastfeeding that goes on. There's like a lot of attachment building. Um, and the kids, uh, infants start to learn what's called object permanence, for example, is a hallmark, um, between zero to one that, you know, if ma, uh, then an object will still exist even if it disappears, you know, that an object is still there. So if you, you know, if you're, you know, dropping your child at daycare, they know that mom or dad will come back.

• 1:48:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  So that's one concept that unfolds, um, over time from zero to one. Um, and then, you know, to toddlerhoods, you hear about the terrible twos, um, a time when their, their, their will and their control and, you know, I, I want to do it my way, you know, sort of comes online. And that is so as a parent to help support that you'd want to help them, you know, not be too over controlling, kind of, of course you have to control if they're going to run onto the street or something like that, but you want to give them choices. Like, what would you like to wear this or this today? Finding ways to build in some of their unique, um, interests that are coming online to, to support that. And there was a second part of the question that you had asked.

• 1:48:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, when you think of what to do, I generally look at it, you know, most people know I've got a young nine month old daughter. And I already can tell a couple of things. The first is allowing for the exploration and all of this. It just, you could tell like she's figuring things out.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:49:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And the first time she like going to pick something up and put it down and like, like it's like, cool, right?

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  Cause and effect.

• 1:49:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. A friend told me, he's like, you're going to rediscover the world through the eyes of a child.

• 1:49:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:49:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I see that. But also there's probably things that parents should not do between the ages of like zero to five. And some of it, I categorize as like the overly ambitious parent of like, you're trying to push your kid too much to do things. So like, are there things there? And then also just like, things that could just be detrimental to their development as well. What are some of those things?

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  Okay, great. And I think I just recalled, you mentioned the nature versus nurture debate. So I want to also make sure I answer that. And so, you know, as you know, for nature, though, we're referring to things like our genes, right? And the thought was that once those genes are there from, that you've inherited from your parents, that is set in stone. And that's what you're going to become and dictate who you are. And then the nurture, the nurture side of things is the environment experiences, right? And fortunately, this debate has been put to rest. We know, as you said, that things are not black and white. That it's a combination of nature versus nurture and nurture. And it's a field called epigenetics, which looks at how the environment shapes which genes and when are expressed.

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  So this can be easily, as an example, in the field of toxic stress, for example. Or when children face prolonged periods of, of stress, constantly are, you know, bombarded with domestic violence, for example, in the home. Or food insecurity and things like that. And they don't have the buffer of a parent, of a caregiver to buffer that stress. That's when we know things, the brain architecture, the development of our brain and our neurons and the pathways. And then, you know, lead to poor outcomes.

• 1:50:58Anthony Pompliano?

  What happens in that situation? Because you've done a lot of work here on children and kind of being exposed to various stressful situations, especially in development. Like, if a child is unfortunately exposed to these stresses, what is, is it literally the chemistry in their brain is changing?

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, the physiological profiles, the chemistry in their brain, because when you're stressed, right, you have the fight or flight or freeze coming online. And so your body is pumping cortisol, is pumping adrenaline, and those hormones makes the blood vessels send, send blood to your muscles, your extremities, and takes away from the brain. So your brain is not really developing and forming as it should. Kids who have been exposed to toxic stress, their amygdala is always in looking out for danger. That's the amygdala looks for threat, for fear, is the fear part of our brain. And the prefrontal cortex that we talked about earlier is not coming online, and it's not sending back messages saying, I'm safe, calm down, you can rest, you can digest, everything. So everything

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  from physical health, you know, diabetes, heart disease, it's like if your body was a car, it would be like it's constantly revving that car engine, and there's a lot of wear and tear and stress in the body. So not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, cognitively, all those things. That's why it's so critical for the early period.

• 1:52:15Anthony Pompliano?

  What's fascinating is, it immediately jumps to mind, I have somebody that I met, and they were explaining to me that babies could be born, obviously to parents who are addicted to certain types of drugs. And the woman who was telling me this, her parents had actually adopted a child who was addicted to meth, because the parents had been, or the mother had been on meth. And what she said to me, which was fascinating, was there are a number of examples where actually physically, these children are what society would deem as like ripped, right? And their physiological structure appears to be different from a cosmetic standpoint.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's because actually while they're in the womb, they're so stressed out 24/7, that there's almost this like a flexing. That's happening. And so, again, understanding that that's not my specialty and I'll take that at face value, that there's some directional truth to that. Is the same thing happening with the brain as well, both, you know, in the womb, if the if the mother is stressed, and then also in the early years, if the child itself is stressed?

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. When we we look at things from prenatal, how the the mother was during pregnancy, you know, if she was involved in a stressful, interpersonally violent relationship, we look at that. All those things, you know, because the fetus is developing and, you know, all the, you know, the heartbeat, all those things. And also, when you're born, you know, I think, I think the research says that by age three, 80% of the brain is already the size it's going to be as an adult. So it's a very, very critical period. And you had mentioned with the meth examples, similar with alcohol, fetal alcohol syndrome, like the structure of the children with the larger heads and things like that, it affects how, you know, even physically that they appear.

• 1:54:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And are there things that moms can do? So if there's mothers or fathers that are listening to this that are about to have a child, or they are pregnant today, are there things that the mother can do to have less stress, which then will have a positive impact on the cognitive development of the baby? Or is it cognitive development is really only affected post birth?

• 1:54:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Great question. I think just even from, you know, the condition and the the mental state, the emotional state of the family, of the parental relationship, the stability of that as well is something to look at. And of course, there's also intergenerational things to look at as well. But, you know, trying to, yes, you are your, you have to keep that instrument in tune, right? And take care of yourself. So as much as you can take care of yourself, kind of stay less stressed, you'll be more be able to tune to separate sort of what is my sort of anxieties and uncertainties from my child's, and not project that on to the child, for example.

• 1:55:07Speaker 01

  And I'll stop there and say, maybe if there's any, like, when we talk about things that parents can do, are there maybe certain distinctions that we could talk about, maybe?

• 1:55:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and, you know, when my wife was pregnant, one of the things we kept hearing is like, hey, if the mom is not stressed, then the baby will be calmer. And to some degree, you're like, ah, that sounds a little like woo woo, like, sure, maybe, you know, hindsight bias makes you feel better about it. But it does feel like if, you know, I don't know, all of my friends who have been pregnant, some of them were really, really stressed out, not necessarily just because of the pregnancy, because of work or other situations, and some were very calm. And it does feel like the experiences were different to some degree. And I do wonder, you know, how much of an impact on the child does it have?

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, we're talking about the stress when I talked to earlier about like the prefrontal cortex and the McDowell is firing. I think that is when it's like prolonged, unbuffered, chronic type of stress, when you have those changes. But say a little bit of work stress that the mother had, you know, but the child is born healthy and fine, and there is minimal sort of, some stress is good, you know, children develop through these conflicts that they have to resolve at each stage. So some stress and a certain level of anxiety is good. It pushes us to go to get to the next developmental stage, right? So it's, I think what the distinction is when you have that prolonged, unbuffered, you don't have a stable supportive caregiver relationship,

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  caregiving relationship to help you process things and kind of understand the world, that's when things can go all right.

• 1:56:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when we look at this like nature versus nurture, like, what are the parts that genetically people agree in the scientific community, like, okay, these are the genetic things, and whether they're kind of turned on or exposed or expressed, you know, early on versus later, like, this is genetic versus like, are there specific things that are nurtures, specific and not necessarily relying on genes?

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  That's a great question. And I know researchers are studying things that at the gene level or the cellular level, for example, like telomeres, for example, you know, in kids who have been exposed to chronic stress and trauma, those become shorter and those things, those then, you know, shorter telomeres means shorter length of life, right? And then as far as nurture, on the other side of things that, again, is that supportive, I know I'm repeating myself a lot, but is that supportive caregiver relationship with, that attachment relationship with you and your child, that, that will help them sort of get that resiliency to bounce back from things?

• 1:57:35Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the pieces of advice that I've heard repeated over and over again is just like, the best thing you can do for your kid is love them. And it's kind of this weird thing, it's not very quantitative, right? It's not like a prescriptive, okay, I do A, B, and C every day and like, we're good. How important is that? And are there ways that maybe a kid who's, you know, zero to five years old versus like a teenager, kind of feels that differently? Or is it pretty much the same thing of like, literally just care and you should be okay?

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, such a great question. And love is a great concept. And, you know, there's different ways to describe love. And, and I, you know, speaking here as a parent myself with two kids, and then also then I could speak from a psychological perspective. And, you know, when you think of love and you're thinking about attachment, which is about, you know, the relationship and bonds with a significant caregiver or romantic partner. And you think about attachment, again, there's a study, you know, the Harlow monkey, the rhesus monkey study, where they had, they took some rhesus monkeys, infant ones that were just born, and put them with wire monkeys, a wire monkey with a bottle, and then a

• 1:58:41Speaker 01

  wire monkey with a terry cloth, a soft, kind of cuddly terry cloth. And the baby monkeys, whenever they were scared or frightened, well, first of all, they spent more significant time cuddling up with the terry cloth monkey. But even though they had, the other one had food. So they would just get the food and then head back to the other monkey. So that attachment, that love is, is, is important. And then sort of speaking from a Personal hat, a person of faith, for example, you know, love, loving your kid, loving your spouse, that parental love that you model in the home, that love and self-sacrifice, that self-donative love is a good context and foundation that children can then develop socially

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  and prosocially in. Like, where are kids' first educators in that?

• 1:59:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And speaking of education, there's a million toys and software and all kinds of crazy stuff that I've seen. Some friends have, you know, they swear by, others are ads that you see on Instagram or whatever, but they all promise something similar, which is like, we can accelerate the child's cognitive development, we can keep them on track. Is this all real? Is it bullshit? Like, how should parents think about a lot of these supplemental things? And, you know, I don't know, if I ask my dad, he's like, back in the day, no one had any of this stuff, right? And like, everyone turned out okay. Like, how do you think about that from like a psychological development standpoint?

• 2:00:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Another great question. And again, I'm not a person that throws like the baby out with the bathwater. I like kind of moderation and balance. And I think technology can harness a lot of great learning opportunities. It can hasten learning, for example, in some ways. But those same, you know, it can, it can create contacts with, you know, with people around the world that you wouldn't have had opportunity back in the day to have. And so those, I think some of those same, those same characteristics that, that, that make technology so great can also be its downfall as well. Just the instantaneous, instant gratification, right? Social media, you know, you have kids, as you said, spending more time on their tablets

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  and their phones than being out with friends, having face-to-face conversations. But as far as the toys question, I think you had mentioned, for especially young kids, when you think about like an iPad and you think about a young two-year-old just passively sitting there, kind of watching what's being fed to them, you want to look at toys that you, as a parent, can have what's called the serve. And return type of building that reciprocity. You have joint attention, you have the eye contact. You're saying, I see you. I see the things that, you know, oh, you heard the bird in the sky that just flew overhead. I see it too. You're labeling them, you know, the things that they can see in the world. You're having them with you, narrating the things you're doing, washing the dishes.

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  So toys, you know, that like puzzles, building blocks. Those types of things are, they still have a good place.

• 2:01:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so really it almost feels like active versus passive. It becomes like a big differentiator between the things that the kids do. And it sounds like maybe it's not the extremes of like, it has to be a hundred percent active or a hundred percent passive. Instead, there may be a time and a place.

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I think everyone's gone to a restaurant and seen the parents like.

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  I need to eat.

• 2:01:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Here's the phone. Like, I swore I wouldn't be that parent and like, here's the phone, kid. Right? Yeah. It feels like that doesn't necessarily, you know, destroy all of the progress that's made elsewhere. But maybe the majority of time you want in more of an active.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Learning experience. Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:02:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And talk a little bit about, you mentioned describing the things that you're doing or kind of labeling these pieces. Like, what is going on with the child, especially kind of five or under? Like, what is going on with the cognitive development as to like, why it's important to almost talk to them in that way?

• 2:02:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, talking with them, you know, they don't have the language yet. So kind of hearing, modeling is from these continued structure and routine and playing with them that they end up then building up the capacity to do these things. So I was talking about the, um, the stages in the beginning, like zero to one, that sensory motor stage. And then the next stage would be, you know, their minds, child's mind is so different than an adult's mind. So, you know, when they're like two to about six, they have, for example, what's called like magical thinking, like they think that because they wish something, it's going to happen. And they're very egocentric in their thinking. So they don't take the perspective of another person, for example.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  It's like why when I'm playing hide and seek with my, my, my daughter and she thinks that when just because she puts the blanket over her head, it means that I can't see her or she hides and she's hiding in plain sight. And she doesn't know that I I can see, you know, I can see her. So.

• 2:03:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's because she can't see you.

• 2:03:30Speaker 01

  Yes, she thinks that I can, yeah. Or it's like if I have a boo boo or something and she's like, oh, here's take this stuffy toy. It's gonna make you feel better, you know, like the ways that would comfort her is the way that would comfort me as as an adult. So they're very egocentric. I see you have a question.

• 2:03:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, and I guess part of that is there's this famous study that says lower income children will actually hear thirty million less words than their higher income peers. But then they reach kindergarten and we don't think, you know, if we sat here and already kind of how many words we've spoken in this conversation alone, it'd be a lot more than we probably would guess. But thirty million words seems so drastic of a swing between high and low income children. It sounds like a huge piece of this, like talking to the kid, right? And engaging with them.

• 2:04:19Speaker 01

  Right. And then reading to them, providing, you know, opportunities for them to to. I think I think though a lot though is that interactive piece because you can talk around them. You could talk like they could be hearing you peripherally talking like, say, we had a child here. But I think again, like it's that interactive piece of talking with them, talking to them. And also trying to avoid the the motherese kind of babbling like like talking, talking regular sentences as you would so that they they don't kind of end up with that baby kind of talk, you know, you want to speak in regular words so that they can hear how the regular word would sound.

• 2:04:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And is this like you treat the kid, maybe not like an adult, but you treat them like a human that you would have a regular conversation with and and then they will develop faster? Or not so much and maybe something else you're optimizing for?

• 2:05:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, not so much. I think though, I mean, there's a place for like the the big expressions and then like the eye contact. I think I think it's when they're starting to to learn to speak at a at some point. You just want to make sure that you're just you're able to say words that that won't then. They will learn that are that are the regular ways of our language or English language. Yeah.

• 2:05:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And then what about multiple languages, either at home or, you know, at school or whatever? I know some folks who the parents both speak English, they're native English speakers, and they have an aspiration for their kid to learn another language. They put them into specific school settings. I know the opposite end of the spectrum, which is English as a second language in the home. And so the parents will say, hey, you'll learn English at school and you'll learn whatever the native language is here at home. How does multiple languages and the exposure to that at an early age develop the like cognitive abilities of the child as they get older?

• 2:06:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. And I know researchers do study sort of the effects of learning two languages and when a child begins to talk or even IQ and academic achievement. The one thing I remember taking away from some of that literature is that, you know, those who are bilingual or trilingual or learn many different languages, they have greater cognitive flexibility. As you can imagine, you know, they're switching between two languages in their brain and two types of maybe cultural contexts as well. You know, if you're from, say, where I'm from in Jamaica, for example, or in the US, you know, there's a different sort of context as well that comes on. So there's a there's the benefit of having cognitive flexibility when you speak multiple languages.

• 2:06:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And something like cognitive flexibility, like if you walked out on the street and you asked a random person, like, what is that? They'd be like, I have no clue. Right? It sounds like a smart person thing, right? It's kind of like the general reaction that you'd get. How much of a parent's kind of activities can be dictated around like, I want my kid to be high IQ. I want my kid to have cognitive flexibility. And it's like almost intentional versus some of these things are just merely the result of a great loving environment that's stable without a lot of stress and it's not so much prescriptive. Like, can parents specifically say, like, I want my kid to have a high IQ and so let's do A, B, and C? Or is that wishful thinking and maybe parents are over optimizing?

• 2:07:30Speaker 01

  So that's one thing when you mention IQ, that is something kind of determined a little bit by like endowment, like kind of what you're born with, a little bit of an innate thing. Although, you know, intelligence itself, it's a hot, you know, it's a very hotly debated. Construct, but if you think about the definition of intelligence as reason, the capacity to think, to reason, to solve problems, to be able to put together knowledge in novel ways, you know, things like that, those things can be obviously fostered. But when you think of IQ specifically, as it is in a psychological sense to be measured and through tests, that is something that is sort of more endowment.

• 2:08:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, somebody recently was on the show and they basically were like, look, people don't like to hear it, but like intelligence is very much genetically driven and kind of inherited and all these things. Now you can do things to kind of move within some band around the starting point, which does mean that you have some control and you should do the right things, whatever. But unfortunately, you know, that's just one of those things that you're not going to jump from 100 to 160, right?

• 2:08:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:08:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what are the things that you see parents optimizing for? If IQ is something that, you know, is much more inherent or due to, you know, the genetic component, is it like cognitive flexibility? Is it emotional kind of stability? Like, what do you see parents doing in, again, this kind of zero to five range that they're really obsessed with ensuring that their child is set up for success?

• 2:09:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. And, you know, I think parenting just raises so much uncertainties in you as a parent because we don't have our user manual for our kid, which would be so nice. And, you know, there's so many things that we also examine in our own, you know, in our own childhood, through our own parents that we say, okay, we'll never do the same thing with our, with our kids. I think just the critical message early on, you know, from zero to five is, you know, just your presence, your supportive, loving presence. You know, if there's an, if you see early signs of, you know, thing of development sort of not coming online, if they're not speaking, you know, trying to, there's, you know, there's knowing that there's services that can help, help that

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  critical period because zero to three, you know, things go online pretty fast. And so, yeah, I think, I think to answer that question, though, it's just so multifaceted.

• 2:10:03Speaker 01

  I just can't stress enough, I guess, the support, the role of a supportive, present caregiver that you have an attachment to.

• 2:10:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the dark side of this conversation, I think, is like, if you look at the numbers in the United States specifically, but probably globally as well, but I'm more familiar with the US numbers, the decline of like, the nuclear family is pretty well documented.

• 2:10:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:10:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it, although unfortunate, fair to say, hey, as we see that decline, there will be changes to cognitive development, childhood development, in the families where there isn't two parents with the kind of loving, supportive, stable relationship that you're describing?

• 2:10:42Speaker 01

  That's something I think about, you know, a lot, having gone through parenthood myself, and having to work at the same time, and just coming from, you know, exposure to other countries and knowing what their sort of parental leave policies are, for example. And there's that saying that the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that will change the world or move the world. And, you know, it feels like, at least in this country, that there's just, nobody has time to rock who's in the cradle, who is growing up the babies, you know, in the cradle right now. And, like you said, the digital age with technology, there's kind of babysitting with the iPad and things like that. So I definitely think about that. And it just, you know, just thinking about policies in place, even as one thing, as parental leave and just having time, you know, to adjust, you know, in Canada, it could

• 2:11:26Speaker 01

  be up to a year or two of paid parental leave that you can get. But here, I think it's six weeks or something.

• 2:11:32Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like there's a spectrum of, like, we'll call, and again, just for lack of better descriptive word, like, the traditional two-parent household, right, with one of the parents going to work and the other staying at home, happens to be usually the wife was staying home and the husband was going to work, but could be in any form or fashion. That next step or evolution of that is both parents working, right? And maybe less time with the kids or whatever. But then there's this like very extreme version, which is, you know, the, again, I think unfortunate, but quintessential example of like the single mother who's raising three kids and works two jobs. And unfortunately, politicians on both sides of the aisle like to point to that as like, that's who we're trying to help.

• 2:12:17Anthony Pompliano?

  But it feels like that environment is different and distinct from like, oh, both parents work, right? There's still two parents in the household. And yes, maybe they're not spending as much time as kind of the traditional model. But it's a very different situation when it's, you know, a single mother working two jobs and has three kids. How do you think about the development of the children in these different scenarios? And is it almost like a trajectory change in their cognitive development? Or is there a different way to think about it?

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  I mean, you can think of examples of people, right? Who grew up with a single parent, right? Who still go on to have academic success or music success. I'm thinking about though, in the third example that you gave, you know, and if it lends itself to more opportunities for children to children's issues, right, to be to go unnoticed, right? Or, you know, you're less in the care of your, your, your, your parent, your caregiver. And so I know it takes a village, though, to raise children, right? There's the role of aunts and uncles and grandparents, of course, a lot of grandparents in these cases. And, you know, I think if it does take a village, but we want to make sure that there's somebody at

• 2:14:40Speaker 01

  least that they're connected to, somebody that has an eye on, you know, you just don't want them to be alone with unhelpful. For example, if they faced abuse or something like that, you don't want them to be alone with that. You want to have an eye and, you know, be able to, to say, hey, what's going on? Hey, what's wrong? Notice changes. But when everybody's so busy, everybody's so busy working, things go unidentified. And then you have long-term poorer psychiatric outcomes.

• 2:15:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's fascinating about the scenario, and if you kind of use hindsight as a crutch here, there are people who are successful based on a bunch of different aspects, who come from, you know, the traditional two parents, you know, one stays-at-home model, to single mother or father with multiple kids and multiple jobs. And so I don't think that it necessarily prevents the outliers, right? In either one of those scenarios. I think the conversation that I see people having is more so like, what's the average? Right? And if you go back to whether it's, you know, a kid hears 30 million less words before kindergarten, or you look at certain family structures or kind of childhood experiences, it just makes it harder.

• 2:15:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:15:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think the people who end up being the outlier, they actually point back and like, that's why I'm successful.

• 2:15:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Because I experienced this early on and it drove me, it motivated me, it did whatever.

• 2:15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there a way for the parents in those situations? Can they do certain things to help with the cognitive development? Even though maybe they don't have the kind of supportive, stable environment that you're saying is like, okay, that's option one, right? And kind of the ideal scenario. But are there certain things that either research or people have come across where it's like, if you're a single parent, here are some things that you can do. It may not be time, it may not be the ability to sit for two hours and talk to the kid. But there are certain things you can do that can at least have some impact.

• 2:16:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. That question, it makes me think, you know, I mean, that, you know, you ensure that, you know, they're going to school, they're taken care of, like medically. And then at a certain point, sometimes, you know, like school, when they reach adolescent age, you know, the peer group becomes a very big part of their world. And so just, so if I'm getting it right, you're asking me if in each, in the middle ground of these two situations, is there a way that parents can foster optimal cognitive development such that some of these people can also reach to the heights of, say, somebody who said that, well, it was this environment that made me who I am. I have grit, I have determination, I have the capacity to some extract the good things from my environment and then enact

• 2:17:09Speaker 01

  those? Is that kind of?

• 2:17:11Anthony Pompliano?

  If you think, so there's many stories where people have been successful coming from less than ideal scenarios. And what I've always found fascinating is usually the way they tell the story. And again, you know, hindsight, you want to make it seem, you know, like this heroic journey. But there's somebody, whether it was, hey, I had a single mother, and they always told me that I would be successful. Or they instilled a certain level of confidence. Or they explained, hey, we don't have what everyone else has, but like, we have the ability to work hard to eventually get that. Or there's always something that seems to come from that environment where they're able to latch on to it. And fortunately, or unfortunately, there may not be one answer, right? It may just be,

• 2:17:56Anthony Pompliano?

  hey, you're dealt the cards that you're dealt, and you have to help the kid develop as much as possible. But it sounds like what you're saying is, it's not just the family, right? There's also school, there's also friend groups. Like, there's other pieces that help to influence the development of the child as well.

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah, there's different, there's, it's, it's, it's actually a good, it's why I went into the field of traumatic stress, because I was, you know, growing up in Jamaica and seeing children sort of begging on the streets. But then you hear the heights of music fame, for example, with Bob Marley, or the, you stay in bold, like sprinters, and, you know, great thinkers. And you're like, what is it in that environment that, that still, you know, despite not having all the means, that's Still allows them to thrive. And I think those are, that's why I went into the field to study like, what are the resilient, is it spirituality? Is it like a just a belief that, you know, you know, even though hardships are always going to be there, but I can still succeed if I, you know, if I just give my all, or is it, you know, you plus your talent, you know, I just, I think there's, I think that question is to be answered, to be answered on.

• 2:18:55Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you evaluate it today? Like, you've already been studying it for some time. I don't think you'll ever say like, okay, finally I figured it out. Let me go to a different field.

• 2:19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:02Anthony Pompliano?

  But how do you evaluate what, what you've at least learned so far?

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  About resilience, especially in childhood. I mean, again, I sound like a broken record here, but it is really that strong sort of parental buffering, helping you sort of make sense of unexplainable, for example, events that happen in our world. But firstly, I mean, as a parent, if you're a child, you know, you do go through something catastrophic as a school shooting, right? The first thing as a parent should do is to listen. They need, don't assume that you know what they know, what is distressing to them, or what is even the most distressing thing about the school shooting to them. You want to be able to listen with an open ear and appreciate, you know, their experience and their feelings and not just rush to try to put a Band-Aid on

• 2:19:50Speaker 01

  Sullivan and say, everything is going to be okay. You want to sort of validate and appreciate their experience and hear what it is that really impacts them. And, you know, you can ask that through like, what are your friends saying? Kind of open up the conversation, so that it's not as personal. You know, sometimes they don't want to feel like they're out of control. They're like, no, I'm fine. But you want to say, what are your friends saying? What are they talking about, about this? So kind of being a good listener, kind of getting to know what's on their mind. Also taking, you know, your own temperature on, on, on the event and getting supportive if you need it, whether that's from a spouse, or your parents, or a church person, kind of getting your sort of stability back. And so that you'll then be able to then listen and understand and help them make sense of what's going on.

• 2:20:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So if we move from like the zero to five to now, kind of what I'll call school age, I'm sure that there's a much more scientific description. So kind of elementary into middle

• 2:20:45Anthony Pompliano?

  The things that immediately popped to mind are obviously there's bullying that goes on and things that I would categorize as like they've been going on for a long time at that age. What is the research there show in terms of things parents can do to help kind of their kids navigate it? And how much of it is just like, hey, you're going to deal with this and it's better just to listen versus be prescriptive in some way?

• 2:21:07Speaker 01

  You're right. Bullying has gone on for a while or roasting or however you want to call it. And then it feels like the online way of it has just can be 10 times, hundredfold worse. And the question, you know, social media, thinking about a social media account for a school each child, I mean, well, obviously, well, 13 and under because of the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act, they shouldn't have an account. They don't allow you to have an account. But thinking of, you know, understanding, so what are my child's friendships like right now, right? Is it filled with drama? Well, then imagine that online is going to be even worse. So, you know, I guess I'm getting at the question, like, when can they have these digital tools to use responsibly? Are they able to commit to you?

• 2:21:52Speaker 01

  So I would imagine that family sort of technology plan to develop with, you know, your teenager or your adolescent on what are the expectations of the use? How long can you have it for? What are the consequences if you, you know, you break the boundaries of this plan? What are the hours that you're able to use it from? Can they, can they follow that contract with you? And will they be responsible enough to use that and have an account?

• 2:22:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So with this family technology plan, is this like a parent sits down with their kids and it's like a negotiation?

• 2:22:25Speaker 01

  Kind of, like, yeah. I mean, although you probably would want to have more of the structure of it, but you can make them feel to have some empowerment.

• 2:22:33Anthony Pompliano?

  We call it a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy, right? That is definitely what that conversation seems to be like. But when you, when you do that, you mentioned a couple of things. What are the types of things that are the most important there? Is it just like, hey, here's what you can do with these tools, whether it's social media, a cell phone or whatever, and here's what you can't? Is it more? Or a focus on like the punishment, like if you had to pick one or two key components of that technology plan for a family, what goes into that?

• 2:23:01Speaker 01

  Definitely not the punishment, you know, even with punishment with kids, it doesn't teach them what they're supposed to do, right? So you want to lay out more of here are the things that you can go on, but in terms of what you can't do, I would say just more in terms of like, I'm thinking of like location sharing and just things that would put you in, put their child in danger. But it's more of the expectations around use, you know, you can use it maybe for two hours before dinnertime, non during dinnertime, what sites you agree that you can visit, things more, more of what, what your expectations around the use are, unless on the, on the punishment. But they do need to know what the consequences of it are in advance so that you can, so then you don't have to like, in the moment be like, ah, I think, well, you'll just, you know, you're grounded forever, or you're going to take it away for 10 years, you know, kind of thing.

• 2:23:45Speaker 01

  You want to have it just, that you can just say it and you know, you know, the consequence. We agree to this.

• 2:23:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And that goes back a little bit to treating them like a human.

• 2:23:57Anthony Pompliano?

  How about their friends having access to certain things and them not, right? So when I think of elementary school and middle school, one of the like biggest areas of people being bullying, it's like what clothes they wear, you know, who's cool, who's not type stuff. But also I remember being in high school and cell phones started to become popular. And my parents maybe wait just one year, right? But like, a lot of my friends got cell phones, I think maybe freshman in high school or something, and I had to wait till I was like a sophomore. And I remember this is like, this is the worst punishment in the world. It's like, look at that cool thing they have. High school is probably a little bit different than if you're in second or third grade or whatever it is. So like, how should parents think about, not just like, hey, should my kid have this technology or not?

• 2:24:41Anthony Pompliano?

  But are there things to be considered of where maybe other parents are actually giving their kids technology, whether it's cell phones or social media accounts? And if your kid doesn't have it, does that open up any sort of issues or things to be aware of?

• 2:24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, good for your parents. I know there is research to suggest that the longer you wait is better, you know, like they had, they had a study, I think between nine and like 12 year olds. Nine was too early, 12, the longer you wait a little bit, the better. But I hear what you're saying. It's not like the concern is if all their friends have a phone and they're connecting over, you know, texting or having a group chat and you're, I mean, from your personal experience, did you like, were you left out of some things or did you?

• 2:25:26Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it was more so the phones back then, you could play snake.

• 2:25:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Like you could play snake and there was T9 texting. So you tried to do it as efficiently as possible.

• 2:25:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:25:35Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but to the degree, uh, yeah, it was like a, you definitely were like, hey, I want one of those. And, you know, you come with all the nonsense excuses like, Mom, you know, well, don't you want me to be able to call you after school and make sure I'm safe?

• 2:25:48Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:25:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And she's like, no.

• 2:25:51Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but I think that today, part of this is, you know, the communication of kids, obviously, you, you see, you know, Instagram, Snapchat, you know, Twitter, all, all these different things, Tik Tok, whatever. Uh, but also just texting, like, like that is a way that kids communicate in, um, uh, kind of their everyday life that yes, adults do it as well. But if we had text mess, text message groups at nine years old, like I actually am glad I didn't grow up with that as an option, right? Because I don't think that that would have been probably a good thing in hindsight. Uh, but a kid obviously doesn't know that today and they want to participate. So how do parents deal with that?

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, it's, you know, like you said, the social media, people have Instagram, Tik Tok, and it's all sort of ego based. It's like your highlight reel of your life. And then you will, you know, you'll be scrolling for ages, comparing yourself to people's highlight reel. And that can cause obviously anxiety, depression. I mean, suicide is the second leading cause of death in adolescents 10 to 14 in this country.

• 2:26:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 2:26:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:26:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I did not know that.

• 2:26:50Speaker 01

  The first one is accidents.

• 2:26:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Accidents and then suicides.

• 2:26:53Speaker 01

  Suicides. And it's growing in the nine and under population.

• 2:26:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And what is driving that? Is it the social media? Is it?

• 2:27:01Speaker 01

  That I'm not sure of. I'd have to do some more digging. Um, but it is growing and it's for adolescents is the second leading cause of death. So really, you know, you're asking good questions, right? Because you can really get into very serious waters here with our children. And, you know, I think, yeah, just the online space, there's a lot, a lot to unpack. And I think if you can, you know, have that first strong attachment with your with your child, be a good listener, have them develop that relationship with you to communicate, to tell, you know, what's going on, you have a kind of pulse navigating then the technology years in adolescence will be a little bit easier.

• 2:27:40Anthony Pompliano?

  How important is it to teach your kid that being different is good or like, okay, like to some degree, I just think of it as if you reinforce, do what everyone else does, follow what they're doing. In some ways, you're exasperating the if you're different or if you're left out, like it feels like it's more severe, like the feeling. Whereas if you've taught your kid from an early age, like being different is usually a good thing, right? If everyone goes right, sometimes going left actually can be valuable. Or if everyone is thinking one thing, no actually thinking for yourself could be valuable. It feels like that just maybe dulls some of the problems where like, actually, if

• 2:28:25Anthony Pompliano?

  everyone else has a phone and I don't, you know, what's the opportunity that I have versus feeling like I'm left out?

• 2:28:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's almost sounding like you're doing what we call like a cognitive reframe about the situation, which is, which is great, you know, and like being different, you know, there could be upsides to that, right? You know, you're thinking differently and it's, it's about how you, yeah, you think about your situation and not get too one sided or extreme. And so like even as a person myself of like mixed races, you know, thinking about being different. Yes, you feel a little bit like, okay, I cannot relate to everything that everybody, you know, who maybe are more like homogeneous. But then I have, you know, I can draw from different cultural worlds and that's, that's okay, too. You know, there's a place for that as well.

• 2:29:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And another thing that comes to mind in kind of this like elementary into middle school, kids can start to read, right? Thankfully. But everything's so digital today. And I don't know if you've ever seen, there's like, almost like comics, or, hey, you know, 50, 100 years from now, the human evolution, like, we're all gonna, it's gonna be these huge-eyed things from staring at screens all the time, right? And our necks will be slumped over.

• 2:29:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Kind of the, the very dystopian view of, of the future human race. But today, is there a difference? Like, if you have a kid who sits down and reads a physical book versus reads on a cellphone or on a laptop with the digital screen, like, are there studies or research that shows, like, no, actually, the physical book is better? Or maybe the digital kind of consumption method is better? Or do we not yet have enough information to really know what the difference is?

• 2:30:01Speaker 01

  That question, I don't know the exact science, but I can think about ways where technology could be helpful for kids who, who have trouble reading, they need those read aloud stories on the iPad, for example, that could be helpful. But then, you know, obviously, with the paper book, you have that tactile, you have that tactile opportunity to touch the page, to turn the page, just a little bit more fine motor than maybe swiping on the iPad. So those are some differences. But I guess it also just depends for who, you know, if you have special needs, maybe some help with the iPad and reading aloud programs would be, would be beneficial.

• 2:30:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And along these lines of reading, I think most people in the business, finance, technology world, they're like, I want my kid to be smart, right? Which, cool, everyone has pipe dreams. There's gonna be a natural distribution of intelligence. But one thing that is definitely kind of intertwined in society is people who read are smart. And whether there's, you know, truth to that or not, most people I know want their kids to be intelligent. So they'd say, hey, you should read, you should read, you should read.

• 2:31:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Are there things around the reading, like if from a childhood psychological development, should a kid spend more time with other kids or should they spend time reading? And like if your kid is like the extreme and kind of like the quintessential nerd and just sits inside all day and reads, like to me, like, maybe that's not actually that great because you actually do need the social interactions, but being 100% social and not reading at all. And so is this like a classic, just like everything in moderation probably is the best strategy?

• 2:31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think when you're seeing when parents want their kids to be smart, you know, there's book smart and then there are other aspects of life and functioning that outside the classroom, like if you're in a work environment, how good of a colleague or a team player can you be, right? So there's these social skills that they need to develop that they can, you know, only develop with others, right, with their peers, taking turns, knowing boundaries, you know, empathizing with the feelings of others, you'll get that from playing. And then of course, you know, when you have time to read and stretch your imagination, that there's a place for that too. And there's a place for even adult, adult scaffolding to help children accomplish more

• 2:32:25Speaker 01

  than what they're able to do without adult assistance. There's a researcher, a Russian researcher called Lev Vygotsky, who talks about the zone of proximal development, so helping that what it's basically that zone between what I just said, what a child can do without assistance versus what they can do with a more learned caregiver or teacher. So yeah, I think it's again, having all these variety of opportunities to read, to play, to play, to socialize, to bond with an adult, all these things.

• 2:32:54Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the pieces that it feels like an adolescence that can really help with the maturity of everyone is being exposed to many different ideas, many different cultures. And so you'll hear all the time, people will say, oh, kids who traveled a lot as a kid or as an adolescent, maybe even in the college years, they tend to have a more worldly view, right? And that necessarily mean that they're more intelligent and just like they've been exposed to different things that others haven't. Is that a similar phenomenon when you're a kid, like you just want to expose them to a lot of different things? Doesn't mean they're traveling, but you want them to read, you want them to play, you want them to do all these different things and that kind of accelerates the cognitive development as well?

• 2:33:35Speaker 01

  Um, I wouldn't say it accelerates the cognitive development, but you've just given them opportunities to know that there's, with the traveling, that there's a different way of doing things and there's the way of the country that I come from, you know? It just expands, like you said, their worldview and that there's no, you know, cultures around the world develop in, you know, different norms and different values and that makes them, you know, just a more informed citizen. And so, yeah, just having your child, I think what you're talking about is maybe like a well-rounded sort of child when you give them these opportunities, right, to read or to play.

• 2:34:09Anthony Pompliano?

  There's been a number of books that I've seen that are basically written about this idea of, uh, most people want their kid to be a specialist, right? So it's kind of one of the examples is like Tiger Woods. His dad was like, you're gonna be a golfer at, you know, two months old, like, watch golf, swing golf club, be good at golf, right? Uh, and obviously went on and is greatest golfer of all time. But actually, that is the outlier story compared to most people who end up being great at something, take more of a generalist approach and then focus later on in life. And so it sounds like from a childhood development standpoint, actually the generalization and general experience is maybe a better path.

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then looking at, but I mean, you know, there are, there are prodigies, you know, there are things that you can observe in your child to see if they're, that they're developing a talent and then you want to support that, you know, if they're great at art, um, or they, they have a musical inclination, just kind of seeing what they're good at and giving them the opportunity to, to, to, to, to learn that and master that and, and take that.

• 2:35:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What about the role of sports? And sports to me is always this like interesting thing where, uh, there's the parent who like, my kid's gonna be in the NBA. You're like, eh, probably not, but like, okay, you know, good, nice dream and maybe there's some bonding between the child and the parent. But it does feel like there's lessons learned from playing organized sports, whether it's hard work or teamwork or persistence, you know, all these different things. Any thoughts about like, is there a certain age where that stuff is more important? Should, you know, certain types of sports that end up being valuable?

• 2:35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. Like you said, sports, you learn the teamwork. You have to have discipline to, you know, my sister was a swimmer. You'd have to get up in the morning before school for practice and then after school again for another couple of hours. And yes, there is ages that, you know, it would be beneficial to have kids start to do an after school activity, like six to 12, I'm thinking of that age, that stage, I'm sorry, where they need to start having mastery over, over an activity or something that they can do, you know, to feel like they've, you know, they've mastered something. It's, you know, they feel industrious, you know, they, they, they've mastered like, like you said, a sport and I, I just said with sports, there's that team aspect, learning

• 2:36:23Speaker 01

  how to, how to take losses, you know, also, you know, not to, I'm thinking of like when sports teams and they have this like big ego as well, like can, you can want to diminish that a little bit. So yeah, yeah, it's great. It's a great.

• 2:36:35Anthony Pompliano?

  It all feeds into it. Yeah. Yeah. And then what about spending time with kids your age versus spending time with adults? Like there are kids that I know who, I don't know, they're probably in the 10 to 14 range. They're kids of friends of mine and you talk to them and you're like, you are not a 10, like you just socially are able to communicate. You shake my hand, you look me in the eye. Like there's very specific things, the way that they have a command of the language, the things they talk about. You spend time with a lot of adults, it seems like compared to another kid who, you know, is running around and, and again, these are extreme examples, but it feels like they spent way more time with kids than adults.

• 2:37:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there like a perfect formula or is it just again, general well-roundedness and you want them to spend time with adults? You want them to spend time with kids their age as well?

• 2:37:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't, I don't know if there's a perfect formula. But you know, equal, I think they're both equally important. If you have, you know, an older adult who can have stretched their thinking, stretched their abstract thinking and things like that, that's very helpful, you know. And then if you, you know, you have your, you know, if you don't, like you said, if you don't have a peer group and you sort of feel like left out, isolated, disconnected, that's going to burden you as well. And so you want to make sure that you also balance that with peers your age.

• 2:37:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And in that, it feels like when kids hang out with each other, there's like many different settings that they can do it. So obviously, school is a huge one. There's things like sports or whatever. How important is it for them to hang out with each other outside of like the organi, you know, school is very much, especially in today's day and age, like sit in the classroom, be quiet, we're going to teach you, and maybe there's recess or lunch or something. But almost like free form hanging out, like how important is that?

• 2:38:24Speaker 01

  I think that's good, too, you know, to have someone structured free time with your friends. Of course, you know, also at that age, you're also doing after-school activities, like if you were involved in violin, you'd probably be continuing to do that. But you don't want to over-schedule your kids, you know, in so many activities that they just don't have time to be and be who they are with the friends, you know? You want to have a balance. It's always a balance.

• 2:40:07Anthony Pompliano?

  If we go into the school, all kinds of crazy stuff happening, there's seems like it's getting politicized. There's people from all different angles who think they know what's best for all kids. And so like, the first thing I always caveat the conversation with is like, all the kids aren't the same. And so there's probably different ways that certain kids develop, or what would be good for them. But maybe the first thing is just like, when I think of traditional school today, I always think of it in a sense of like, it's prison for kids. And what I mean by that, it sounds bombastic, but it's like, we tell the kids to go somewhere, be quiet, sit down, and it's usually a very one-way kind of lecture. And again, as you get older, it becomes even more and more kind of the

• 2:40:52Anthony Pompliano?

  teacher is teaching you, and you're there to sit and learn. But that's not really what the kids want to do. That's not how kids act. They've got tons of energy. They want to run around. And if there wasn't this mandated school, they would probably not be doing any of that. They wouldn't be sitting down quiet anywhere, right? And so in some way, like, school is very counter to what almost feels like their innate desires. Does that help the kids? Does that hurt the kids? Again, is it just balance? And like, maybe the ideal thing would be like, they go to school for three days, and they're out of school for four days. Or like, how do you think about that?

• 2:41:28Speaker 01

  You know, I think that it always depends on the type of kid and what they need.

• 2:41:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 2:41:36Speaker 01

  So in the traditional schooling system, you were mentioning, you know, it's very structured. So for some kids, like a very unstructured day, you know, someone, you know, with ADHD, for example, it could be very overwhelming, for example. And maybe the traditional schooling model lends itself to certain, the mastery of certain subjects a little bit better. But like you always say, the shortcomings of a traditional school doesn't teach you sort of how to, and this is again, I don't want to be too extreme, but maybe it's less likely than to help you to, you know, think for yourself and have that initiative, right? To take charge of what you're learning and does it apply to me and kind of ask those questions and develop the skills to become sort of a leader and that type of way.

• 2:42:19Speaker 01

  I don't think, like you said, that the traditional school is sort of like, you know, you sit, you absorb type of thing, type of knowledge. And I think in some ways, you know, that structure, that routine is necessary in childhood because, you know, children develop off of that. And then from there, then they develop as they're adults, right? We need that sort of routine, structure, predictability in our world.

• 2:42:43Speaker 01

  But I think that, I think, but I think at the end of the day, it boils down to what the kid needs. If you have special needs, if you're a gifted child, for example, you might need a different environment.

• 2:42:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, one of the most popular kind of education models in the tech industry is the Montessori schools. Some of that's because there's people who've built very large companies and they went to Montessori schools. So everyone's like, well, if I want my kid to do that, then let's go to a Montessori school. Some of it is, no, actually, I think that's a better learning environment. So there's all different reasons people do it. What are the pros and cons of, you know, kind of a more structured, traditional system versus something that's more kind of the Montessori school, like, hey, you know, the hallmarks of that type of education is like they address the teacher sometimes with their first name, not the Mr. Or Mrs. It may be more like, what do you want to work on today versus do this worksheet?

• 2:43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, is there research or anything in terms of, there's different outcomes for kids who go through the different models?

• 2:43:39Speaker 01

  I'm not aware of the different model research, but I think it just depends on the environment your child would thrive in. If they're like an independent sort of learner, thinker, self-starter, you know, they do well with that, then the Montessori education could benefit them more. But say to you, to your family, you know, you want sort of a religious education, you want a traditional school, like the values, like obedience, authority, respect, those things a little bit are more important to you, you know, then go with the traditional school. I think it's about finding the right fit. If you're not in the right environmental fit, that's when you can have problems.

• 2:44:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's a fascinating way to think about like, it's kind of like company cultures. There is no good or bad culture, as much as you can go to a company and the culture is the culture. And some employees are like, I love it here. And other employees are like, this is the worst place in the world. They usually quit, right? And so it almost feels like similar to what you're saying. Actually, for the kid, they may enjoy one or the other, or the parents may align their values with one or the other, and then that's the better way to think about it.

• 2:44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think a fit is the best way to think about it.

• 2:44:42Anthony Pompliano?

  When we talk about the schools, you mentioned ADHD earlier. The joke between me and all my friends is we all had ADHD. No one just knew to tell us it, right? As kids, we were rambunctious and we were constantly doing crazy things. And kind of my fear would be if I was a kid today, like they would have drugged the hell out of us and been like, oh, you guys all just need to sit here and basically not move. It's a joke, but like every great joke has a hint of truth in it. And it does feel like there's been an explosion of awareness and diagnoses of ADHD. Obviously, things like Ritalin and others seem to have drastically increased in usage. Whether it should be or should

• 2:45:24Anthony Pompliano?

  not, how do you think about the childhood development of kids that now we're actually addressing something that maybe in the past was just looked at as, oh, they're creative or they're energetic or whatever, and teachers kind of just dealt with it, you know, for lack of a better way? It seems like now there's like this pharmaceutical component that is pretty ingrained in school. Like, what have you seen there? Or how do you think about that? And is there a world where like actually some of the pharmaceutical stuff could be deemed as like external stress on the child because now you're changing the way that they normally would function?

• 2:45:59Speaker 01

  Great questions. Very great questions and thought.

• 2:46:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I told you, I said, I got a lot. We'll sit here until I'm done.

• 2:46:06Speaker 01

  You know, I think, you know, with ADHD, it is one of the most like thrown out diagnosis there is sometimes by people who shouldn't be sort of diagnosing someone with ADHD, uh, who, you know, didn't do, for example, you know, a proper assessment on them to figure out, because symptoms all can look, you know, the same, but what is the diagnosis that's driving these symptoms? You can have a cough, but you know, it doesn't tell me what diagnosis you have if it's like lung cancer or asthma or something, right? So kind of looking, using just the symptoms alone and not doing a proper investigation,

• 2:46:47Speaker 01

  like, is this ADHD or is this really somebody who's traumatized? Um, it, uh, needs to, to be done, first of all. And the second thing I wanted to share about ADHD is that we now know that drugs, pharmaceuticals, pills, medication shouldn't be the first line of treatment for kids with ADHD. You need to try the behavioral, environmental structures and strategies first before then, uh, putting them on kids. So I, I'm not a fan of sort of jumping to pills first, uh, for ADHD. Um, you know, there are things that teachers can do in the classroom already to help kids with ADHD that don't hurt the other kids as well. Um, you know, like having a daily schedule on the, on the, on the board. Um,

• 2:47:32Speaker 01

  you can put that kid a little bit closer to the, to the front or something, giving them a little bit of extra time. There are accommodations that you can make in the school that don't hurt the other kids as well, that, that benefit them too, you know? And you could also re, positive reinforcement at the end of the day, like, um, here's the, here's the thing, here's the number of stars I got for each of the things that I accomplish, that I was supposed to accomplish for today. So, um, yeah, that's what I, I think I'll stop here and you can.

• 2:47:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, i- it's fascinating. You mentioned like sitting in the front of the classroom, uh, and, uh, it's, it's a dumb thing. Um, when I was in college, uh, I was playing football and the coaches used to say, everyone has to sit in the front row. I'm like, this is so dumb. Like, it's not gonna, like, why does it matter if I sit in the front or the back? Like, in hindsight, it definitely mattered, right? And, and some of it may have been just like the teacher can see if you're Like screwing around or whatever, but also for whatever reason, like you're just closer to the information. And like you, you don't feel like you're like hiding behind the rest of the class. There's an element of like the classes behind you so they can see if you're screwing around or whatever. And so I do wonder how much of like the school environment, you know, this idea that like almost every classroom in America, for the most part, in the traditional school system is built the same way.

• 2:48:41Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a chalkboard or like a board, right? There's rows of seats and like, how much of your academic progress and success is literally determined by like whether you chose to sit in the front or the last row?

• 2:48:51Speaker 01

  Oh geez, that I don't, I don't know. I don't know that like.

• 2:48:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, we might not have a right, like a quantitative answer, but like it does feel like there's, there's something.

• 2:49:01Speaker 01

  I would imagine that a child who chooses to sit in the front seat might be just more motivated and, you know, engaged and want to be closer to the teacher and absorb as much as they can. So then it would kind of self-select sort of the students that, you know, end up doing better because they choose to sit in the front. And then where I sit back, you don't have, the teacher doesn't have as much control, you know, and oversight over those at the back.

• 2:49:20Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it's, um, it also, it brings up this idea, uh, we recently were talking, uh, about this idea of, uh, founder volatility. So people who start companies, um, if you almost think of, uh, volatility, so, um, if you have very little volatility, it's basically, uh, your behaviors and your outcomes are within kind of a very narrow band.

• 2:49:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:49:39Anthony Pompliano?

  That's great if you want to start, let's say, a small business. So you want to start a restaurant or you want to start, uh, some local business, which, uh, traditionally the goal is just to make money, right? And you want to have profit and kind of grow the business in a somewhat linear way. In the technology industry, you actually want exponential growth. And so the, the, uh, idea here is that there's a lot of outliers or you want the outliers. So in order to get outliers, you need volatility.

• 2:50:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:50:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And so actually what happens is that, uh, the greater the volatility, the greater the potential outcome. But you can't take someone with very little volatility and get an outlier outcome for the most part, right? And so what that leads me to believe or think about is like when I was in high school and middle school, there's always the teacher who'd be like, I don't know what the outcome is going to be here, but like you're either going to be super successful or you're going to get in a lot of trouble. But like you always knew who those kids were. And they used to be the class clowns, the people who caused problems, you know, who screwed around in the hallways or whatever. But if you extrapolated out, like there was a lot of volatility in those people, like some of them ended up not doing anything.

• 2:50:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:50:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And some of them ended up being highly successful.

• 2:50:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:50:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it almost feels like the school clamps down to some degree on the people who tend to have that volatility because they want everyone to be quiet, sit in the seat, you know, not be disruptive to the school.

• 2:51:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:51:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Should maybe we be encouraging more of that and like saying to ourselves like, no, that's actually where some of our best business people or scientists or whoever may come out of that bucket of kids rather than the other?

• 2:51:15Speaker 01

  No, yeah, I think that's a great example and a great question because as you said, if you were to say like, if I were to do a comprehensive assessment on you as a child and all your friends and you know, everybody has strengths and weaknesses, everybody. So when it comes to like measuring cognitive intelligence, for example, you know, that's a combination score basically of your verbal capacities, your verbal reasoning, verbal concepts, that's, that's one. Then we have processing speed, how fast or slow you process

• 2:51:53Speaker 01

  information. We have visual spatial skills like puzzles, right? We have things like fluid reasoning, how good at you are at taking some novel concepts and just kind of making order out of just new information, abstract information. And so each of you or your profile, each of your friends have different strengths.

• 2:52:18Speaker 01

  And weaknesses and it's about harnessing that and finding out sort of, you know, like what careers and fields that will be good for, what the way you learn best. Are you a sequential processor or are you able to take in information simultaneously? And then just kind of make something novel out of that. So, understanding how these kids learn, understanding then how also their behavior sort of shapes, you know, if in chunk, if learning chunks is better. Those are things that a good psychological assessment could help you understand and figure out what fit then of a of a of a school should benefit you, would benefit you.

• 2:52:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating to think about and we've been talking about school from a traditional sense of kids go, there's teachers, the whole nine years. Over the last two and a half years, there's been some big changes in schools. So, obviously, there was the school shutdowns where kids couldn't go to school. They were doing Zoom or whatever. I've seen screenshots on the internet where like kids were literally on their laptops in their bed while the teacher's teaching or whatever, right? Which

• 2:53:18Speaker 01

  Or not in school, not logging in and missing a whole year of school.

• 2:53:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And so like, I guess, just like, let's start there with just the school shutdowns, which largely seem to be over now, but there are six months to some schools, 18 months.

• 2:53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Where kids were not physically going to the school. Like, what are we seeing now or how are you thinking about that from a development standpoint?

• 2:53:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, as you know, as we said before, we're beating a dead horse, but the school is a place where, you know, it's a provider routine. You wake up in the morning, eat your breakfast and then you go to school. Schools have that sense, give students or children that sense of routine predictability and stability. It also is a place where students would get some of their extra social services if needed, right? Or free lunches sometimes, you know, if you qualified for that. It was the place where you could identify, teachers could identify, for example, if there's abuse going on in the in the home. So, when you have all these shutdowns and you have students not doing that, less face to face time with their peers, not like walking to class to class, you know, more sedentary lifestyle, you know, now, you know, we're seeing, you know, this youth mental health crisis that we talked about.

• 2:54:21Speaker 01

  And it's just been, it's been devastating. I'm glad that schools have reopened and then I know and then there was a portion when it Did reopen, but then when there was an exposure in the class and you had to shut that, or the people who are exposed for like 14 days, stay home. It's so much instability and unpredictability. So one, you know, 15 days you're at home, then back into school again. And then for the poor parents who, you know, had to work. And if you had kids under five during the pandemic, you know, having to work and take care of you. It was just a special place in hell.

• 2:54:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, it's, if you ever talked to like your grandparents or were fortunate to talk to your great grandparents and like the quintessential like back during the war, right? I feel like, you know, 20, 30, 40 years from now, people are like, back during the pandemic. And the kids would be like, shut up.

• 2:55:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:55:07Anthony Pompliano?

  But it is, it was very traumatic for parents.

• 2:55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was. I was, I was pregnant in the pandemic. I had the baby in the pandemic and worked and had another way. It's, yeah.

• 2:55:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and it's just a whole different experience, right?

• 2:55:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, different experience.

• 2:55:20Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the other piece of this is when kids went back into the classroom and still to, to this, to this day, many schools still require kids to wear masks in the school. And so at first I was like, well, you know, whatever the local ordinances are or whatever, like, okay, schools are just going to repeat that. But then I started to read about some of this and they were like, no, like a huge piece of learning to communicate with folks is like the facial expressions and seeing someone's mouth as they talk and like all these things. If you're a kid and you're seven years old and two years of the seven years you've been alive, you haven't seen people's mouths. Like there could be development problems there, right? And so, again, I don't think we have all the information to kind of really understand this.

• 2:56:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56:05Anthony Pompliano?

  But how big of a problem or how like alarmed should parents be that, hey, your kid went to school for, you know, years at this point, literally with something over their face. And so did all their classmates and their teachers. And like, is that something to worry about?

• 2:56:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I know. As you say, we don't have all the answers. I'm not a medical doctor, so I can't really talk about like the breathing or the respiratory effects of wearing a mask for two years for kids two and above. But, you know, it does, you know, on the outset, it feels like, you know, you're not seeing the formation of the mouth, the movement, if you're learning to speak. And I know there, it, there has been some increase in speech and language services since the pandemic. They haven't directly related it yet to the masks. And I know there's also research to show that schools that did require some of the mask mandates were able to stay open a bit longer.

• 2:56:54Speaker 01

  But and again, you know, I, as a parent, you know, and with a young child of two, having, you know, having him not see his teacher's mouth and his, I mean, I guess you can,

• 2:57:06Anthony Pompliano?

  See the eyes.

• 2:57:06Speaker 01

  You can see the eyes and you can see smiles, but it's not the same and we don't know. We just don't know. We have to, we have to better understand that as our, as our, as our field faces this, this new sort of issue.

• 2:57:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and to me, we can't go back and change the past, right?

• 2:57:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:21Anthony Pompliano?

  It is what it is. It happened. Uh, whether you agree with it or not, that, that's where we are. I think the bigger question is if this now becomes a, a crutch from a response standpoint to future issues, right? We've seen, um, there is a monkey pox, right? That's, that's gone. And all of a sudden you see some states being like, oh, state of emergency.

• 2:57:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And it just feels like, once you've kind of breached it, it just like, let's go back to that thing. Cause this is the playbook. Like something happens, we go state of emergency, we do this. And if the part of the response be is, hey, everyone in school put on masks. And then it's just like every year.

• 2:57:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:57:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Kids are putting on masks.

• 2:57:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:57:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Now all of a sudden, like the long-term impact of this could be very, very important to understand.

• 2:58:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think you were highlighting sort of a very reactionary response, a response sort of based out of fear. And we know when we respond to something, when we're overwhelmed or based out of fear, our thinking gets very narrowed and we're not able to think, you know, flexibly and have a, a response of that really requires what, you know, you can't assess the problem as, as good as you can if you're, if you're reacting out of fear. And so I think, you know, it's a time for, for, you know, leaders to come together and think about what are the concerns here? How, and if this continues on a long-term, what should, you know, the response be thinking, um, you know, more so about children's development, long-term, going through this.

• 2:58:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:58:41Anthony Pompliano?

  As we think about that development, um, I know that you've done some work on like children's exposure to violence in the United States. Um, and violence can encompass a lot of things.

• 2:58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:58:51Anthony Pompliano?

  There's obviously domestic violence. There's, um, hey, I was at a, a place where I saw violence occur.

• 2:58:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:58:58Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, in my community.

• 2:58:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:58:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Unfortunately, there's violence at school. There's school shootings, things like that.

• 2:59:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:59:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Help me understand a little bit better in terms of like some of the research that you've done there and like what are we learning about children's exposure to violence in the US in light of their kind of cognitive development?

• 2:59:13Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Yeah, there, you know, I think two thirds of children witness violence in the US.

• 2:59:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Two thirds?

• 2:59:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, growing up. And well, worldwide, 70% of people experience something traumatic. Fortunately, only about 15, 10%, I'm sorry, 15 to 20% go on to develop PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. So yeah, I've done some work in the trauma field, child and family traumatic stress. And like you said, a traumatic event could be something where, you know, you witness the loss of life of someone, or it could be a domestic violence incident, or school shootings, suicide. And so trauma is, so it's this external sort of injury, you know, it's a Greek word for injury, trauma. And it sort of leaves the person unable to cope, overwhelmed, helplessness,

• 3:00:06Speaker 01

  horror. But fortunately, and there are certain signs and symptoms. Would it be helpful to share some of them?

• 3:00:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 3:00:13Speaker 01

  Okay. So with the traumatic experience, some of the symptoms that we see is a lot of hyperarousal, so exaggerated startle. If you hear like a noise, you immediately kind of like you're hyper aroused, you're startled easily. We have some of the re-experiencing symptoms, like the nightmares, and the flashbacks, and intrusive thoughts and memories. And then you have the negative alterations in cognition and mood. So you'll see here are things like the world is a bad place, all people are scary, I can't trust other people, I can't trust police. And then you have obviously some changes in mood. So depression, isolation, unable to feel positive feelings. And then you have the hall, one of the hallmarks of

• 3:00:55Speaker 01

  trauma is this avoidance piece. So not wanting to see or remember or hear things related to the traumatic incident, not wanting to go by, you know, the school, for example, this big avoidance cognitively and in person, like not wanting to physically see. So you have those symptoms that constitute sort of The clinical symptoms of PTSD, of post-traumatic stress disorder. And again, not everybody who goes through a traumatic event will end up with PTSD. But the earlier you can identify these signs and symptoms, the better and match them with evidence-based treatments that work, the better we can put kids back on the path to recovery and normal developmental trajectory.

• 3:01:33Anthony Pompliano?

  What are some of the evidence-based treatments that kids can go through that? I don't know if it reverses or maybe just kind of dulls the effects of.

• 3:01:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So, so for, for say a kid was exposed. So there's different phases of the trauma exposure. So there's the acute phase, like that's the on-scene sort of response when you see police show up. And then there is a phase in between, in between that event up to 30 days. We call that peri-traumatic phase. And then you have the longer-term phase, a month and after. And so, you know, having trained at the Yale Child Study Center, at the Yale Center for Trauma, Traumatic Stress and Recovery, they developed a treatment for that peri-traumatic phase, for example, so right after an event and then the days and the weeks leading afterwards, that actually children who go through that are 65% less likely to meet criteria for PTSD. So it's preventing the onset of PTSD. So there's that treatment is called the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention,

• 3:02:23Speaker 01

  also known as CFTSI. But say it's been a longer time, like six months and out years. The other intervention for that, the evidence-based treatment that children can get is called Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, TFCBT. Those two are great evidence-based treatments for these specific periods after the traumatic event.

• 3:02:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And the 30 days right after, like what is going on in that program or that intervention?

• 3:02:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, if you think about the traumatic dysregulation, right? Those symptoms that I hadn't explained, kind of repeating the experience of sense of loss of control. So it's not only the, it's not only the experience of the traumatic event, right? That's traumatic, but it's yours then symptoms, you're feeling personally out of control. You know, your body, your mind, the way you think, the feelings. That intervention aims for, is for children ages seven to 18.

• 3:03:11Speaker 01

  The aim is to help have a caregiver, a supportive caregiver, or a parent. Through, it's a family strengthening approach. It's basically to help turn the volume down on some of the symptoms, identify, first identify those symptoms, actually which ones are the most distressing, turn the volume down on it, and help the caregiver and the child communicate better about the experience. You don't go through actually the details of the event. You don't have to relive and talk about and debrief what happened, but really it's how to help them sort of turn the volume down on those most distressing symptoms.

• 3:04:45Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of this is only addressable after the fact? So, you know, let's go to the extreme and say a school shooting, for example, versus in the military where PTSD is quite prevalent. They tend to do, whether intentionally or not, a ton of what I'll call mental conditioning, that's a very unscientific term, of during basic training and all these things, like they put people in hard situations. They seem to attempt to increase the mental toughness and all this stuff. Now, a school shooting is not a sense of like, hey, my kid should have went and played sports and like developed mental toughness, right? That there's a super traumatic event that seems to be an outlier, which is more akin, frankly, to combat or something like that.

• 3:05:31Anthony Pompliano?

  But then there's a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't seem as extreme, but still is traumatic or provides stress. And so is there an ability for parents to hope for the best, right? And say, hey, I hope my kid never deals with any sort of traumatic event or anything. But they can do things to increase, whether it's like the mental toughness or do things to help them be prepared in case they ever do encounter one of these situations? Or is really the only thing that we know so far that works is like evidence-based treatments after the fact, and that's where we can have some impact?

• 3:06:03Speaker 01

  Okay, so you're asking if there's anything to do to prepare the child's functioning in the event of such a traumatic?

• 3:06:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, in the most layman's way to think about it, right? There are parents who are like, I'm gonna make my kid do hard shit, because like, the world is hard out there, right? And like, learning that lesson today in this like somewhat controlled environment is much better than like, let me coddle them and then send them off into the world and like, they get punched in the face, you know, metaphorically by like, the world. Do we know, like, if people are put into those situations before a traumatic event, do they tend to have more resilience and less of the PTSD kind of impact afterwards? Or is it really just this like, kind of 30, you know, 30 or six month?

• 3:06:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's definitely not the 30 days after thing that can, that sets apart, that can help recover, someone recover from PTSD. You know, we look at previous functioning, right? Prior to an event happening, and their sort of developmental snapshot of their developmental sort of status. Like, we want to know kind of what, what their life was like prior to this event, so we can know kind of, you know, what was, what was their normative functioning? And how is it then disturbed or distressed after the traumatic event? So, you know, if your child was, you know, you had a stable...

• 3:07:32Speaker 01

  School life, you had a caregiver who you could rely upon. They were engaged in extracurricular activities that they felt, they felt masterful. That they, you know, they, they were doing well in school already academically. All these things, and then after the event, if you have then a supportive caregiver to help the child, that most times they'll be, they'll be all right. So it's not about what you can really do to prepare. I think, I think what you're touching upon though, is that when a traumatic events happen, their world is sort of shaken and their thinking gets a little bit shaken as well. Right? Their thinking kind of, then they start to over accommodate their thinking to like, oh my gosh, like the world is unsafe and very scary. And so it's kind of helping them get back to a more realistic and helpful statement.

• 3:08:17Speaker 01

  If their world is safe, you want to remind them that the world is safe.

• 3:08:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I, it's, it's this weird conversation in society today because I think that it gets politicized. But if you kind of strip away all the emotional components and the politicization of it, to some degree, there is this undertone where a large portion of society feels like, oh, kids today are coddled and whether it's in the school system or by their parents or whatever. And there's like less mental toughness, right? Now, I say that from the sense of, I grew up in a family with five boys and like, a lot of disagreements got settled with our fists, right? And so like naturally, that's a very different environment. But if you just kind of revert to the mean, right? It's like, you don't want a society where everyone is coddled and like, basically somebody

• 3:09:04Anthony Pompliano?

  says, you know, mean words to you and your whole life gets derailed. But you also don't want, you know, I don't know, like ancient Rome warriors where everyone's like walking around, like killing each other. So like, there's some middle ground that I think as a society, we're like, cool. We want people to have some degree of resilience and kind of mental toughness. But also we want to be very cognizant of the fact that like, the kid who is sitting in a classroom, all of a sudden gunshots go off and somebody comes to their school and starts shooting, like they are going to have to deal with shit, right? And not only the kids, like the parents probably as well. And so when we think about this, it feels, again, it gets politicized. And so it gets over rotated on both sides, but you know, a common theme of our conversation today just feels like, it's like the moderation.

• 3:09:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like, no, listen, you can in some ways be, I heard the phrase recently, demanding, but supportive. And so you want to have the demanding aspect of like, hey, there is a real world and you want to be prepared for it, but also don't forget the supportive part.

• 3:10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like an authoritative parent. You know, you have the authoritarian who is very demanding, but the authoritative, I'm sorry, is one who you do have expectations, but they're also very warm at the same time. So you're kind of giving that both balanced.

• 3:10:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Authoritative parent.

• 3:10:19Speaker 01

  Yes, versus authoritarian.

• 3:10:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting. Explain this more about an authoritative parent.

• 3:10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, you're just very warm. You're very, you're loving. You have an attachment with your child, but you also have expectations as well. And you're firm and consistent in the rules of the family and the consequences. You don't, you're not overly permissive, which is the opposite of authoritarian. You're just the kind of laissez faire. You can do whatever you want, kind of, yeah, if you want a car, I'll buy you one, kind of thing. So the authoritative is the balanced one that we found is linked to better outcomes for kids.

• 3:10:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so it has this element of like, there's an expectation and to some degree, discipline or something is kind of laced into that. But also you're still the parent and you still care about the kid.

• 3:11:02Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 3:11:03Anthony Pompliano?

  It's very similar to management.

• 3:11:06Speaker 01

  I'm sure there's a term in management, right?

• 3:11:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 3:11:09Speaker 01

  What is the term?

• 3:11:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, I guess if you're a good boss, then you make a good parent, hopefully. Identity is another thing that you've spent a lot of time looking at. You have a very unique background in that you are Jamaican and Chinese descent. How does identity play into a child's kind of cognitive development? And like, is that something that the parent kind of dictates to the kid, like you are X and then they internalize it?

• 3:11:38Speaker 01

  That's a great question.

• 3:11:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is it something that they just like?

• 3:11:40Speaker 01

  So great question.

• 3:11:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Implicitly get?

• 3:11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's so many ways to go with this. Okay. Well, to answer the latter question about does parents play a role into a kid's identity, I'm thinking about James Marcia's theory on identity development, which talks a little, which uses two sort of constructs on exploration and commitment. And when you cross the two, you get four outcomes. So I'm thinking of, you said there, like if a parent's like, Hey, like, we're, you know, Italian or something. This is the this is the cultural identity you need to adhere to. And so you, as a kid, then to just accept that, you would be called in that Marcia's Four Outcomes. You would be what's called in the foreclosed identity. So you didn't want, you didn't do any extra exploration.

• 3:12:25Speaker 01

  You're already committed to this Italian identity. And then if you, but if you did like high exploration, so you were high, you know, you looked around a little bit about, we've talked about careers, for example, right? You looked around and then you committed to this highly, you would be what's called the achieved sort of integrated identity. However, there's another identity status that could be very diffuse, like you, you haven't committed to anything. And you haven't done an exploration, you're kind of just kind of aimlessly there in society. You don't really have meaningful friendships, you know, you're easily swayed by different things. You don't really have a sense of self. And then this, and then the third, the fourth and final one is identity moratorium,

• 3:13:09Speaker 01

  which is you haven't committed yet to anything, but you're still searching, you're searching, searching a lot. So there's four types of sort of identity statuses on somebody's identity development journey based on exploration and commitment. And then I'm forgetting the first part of your question.

• 3:13:26Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, just take that as an example, there's four of these identity buckets. Is any of them better than the others? Like, is there like a design, like, hey, we want kids to end up in bucket four?

• 3:13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, bucket four, you know, the one about high exploration and high commitment. You know, you kind of feel like this integrated sense, okay, I did some, you know, research, I looked around. I didn't just kind of take my parents' word for it type of thing.

• 3:13:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Kind of earned it?

• 3:13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I earned it, I I explored things and I feel comfortable with this final resolution kind of thing. Probably feel more comfortable in my decision. It's an informed decision, like I made an informed decision. I didn't just like sort of take what was like given to me. And then, you know, of course, some can be more anxiety provoking than others. So like if you're in a state of moratorium and you're searching, you probably feel some level of anxiety, like looking for who you are. So then I guess if you then move into the achieved identity, you feel a little bit more bit more just a more relief.

• 3:14:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's fascinating about this is I could think of two different aspects of like identity, right? So like, let's take religion and maybe ethnicity.

• 3:14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:14:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And to me, my family is Italian, right? So big Italian family, like there's all of every single thing that is a generalization, pretty much like check the box. Well, it's just, and by the way, every other large Italian family, for the most part, like, yeah, they eat a lot of pasta, they get pretty loud, right? Like, all these things. But what's fascinating about it is you're told as a kid, like, you know, we're Italian, but it's not like, hey, when we get in a disagreement, everyone raise their voices, right? Or that is almost like a learned behavior to some degree. And every single other person I knew that was Italian, I would go to their house and it was the same thing. Like, it wasn't a, it wasn't a thing where I was like, oh, that's weird. Like, it was like, yeah, of course, this is

• 3:15:12Anthony Pompliano?

  how families operate. And you only notice it once, then you would go to a friend's house who's not Italian. You're like, everyone's so quiet around here. So like, to me, that's like, almost like, you're in an environment, you pick up certain things. And, you know, I have experience with an Italian family, but if you went to an Irish family, or you went to, you know, a Chinese family, or whatever, like, there's certain things culturally that are unique to that culture, they pick up. Religion feels much more like you are told things, where I have friends who are Muslims, Jews, Christians, the whole gamut. None of their parents were ever like, you should go out in the world and explore all these other religions, right? Like, that was not a thing. It was like, we are X, you will

• 3:15:57Anthony Pompliano?

  follow X rules, like, whatever the religion was. And it feels much more kind of authoritative, like, top down, I'm going to take you on Sunday to church, right? Or I'm gonna take you to the synagogue, or whatever. Like, is there different parts of an identity that have these different interactions? Or is that just like us trying to make sense of the world that maybe we grew up in, or experienced?

• 3:16:21Speaker 01

  When you say interactions, what do you mean?

• 3:16:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, one's like explicit, like, we are X religion, and we've, and as X religion, we do A, B, and C. The other is more implicit, because no one sits you down and is like, we do A, B, and C. It's just you kind of like, learn the behavior a little bit.

• 3:16:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:16:37Anthony Pompliano?

  As a child, does it matter which one? Or is it actually better to get both types of learning?

• 3:16:44Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I'm thinking of with with religion, for example, like you're right. Like our parents, I mean, my parents didn't give me any choice either, being Catholic. But

• 3:16:54Anthony Pompliano?

  They're like, ah, you know what? You're Jewish people, you should go hang out with them.

• 3:16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think it's a decision that I think that as parents, they have that authority to make. Now, when you get older, at least they've given you that experience and education that you can choose then. Okay, do I want to still continue this because you are an adult? But I think if you didn't have that, because we I'm thinking from just some of the psychological benefits that people who are religious and spiritual can can, you know, can get out of kind of learning about duty. You know, caring for the vulnerable. And I have this thing with psychology, I feel like it's divorced itself. If you think of the word psychology, the study of the soul, the spirit.

• 3:17:40Speaker 01

  And in an effort to, I think, be more like hard science, physics, scientific, it's really tried to to separate itself from some things that are a little bit more like theistic. But when you're looking at who we're studying, like the human experience and the fact that many people in the world are are religious, you know, or belong to a practicing religion. We are missing a big part of the picture with that.

• 3:18:06Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, I have one big last topic to talk about. This is a huge, open secret, which is whenever I sit down with other couples, my wife and I, and we are at dinner or at lunch or we're hanging out with them, whatever. The number one topic that everyone always talks about, but no one wants to admit publicly, is they're all deathly afraid of raising kids that are spoiled. And this is everything from friends who they are teachers to super wealthy, to immigrants, to people who are born in America. I mean, just like across the board.

• 3:18:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It seems like it is a deep seated fear of parents where they say to themselves, "My child is going to have a different childhood than I had." That's almost every parent's dream, right? Is, "I want my kid to live a better life than I had," or "I want my kid to be happier than I had," or "have things that I didn't have," whatever. And there are the extreme examples, right? I'll use a celebrity in Jay-Z, right? And I think he's openly talked about it. He has kids now and he's like, "My kids are living a little bit differently than I did." And that's a good thing. He accomplished that as a parent. But then also, that same story is very true, right? I have a lot of friends who are immigrants and they're like, "Look, like, I was literally born in another country and I came here.

• 3:19:30Anthony Pompliano?

  My kid already, just being born in the United States, I feel like they have a leg up and they're gonna have this different experience." What can parents do to increase the probability, not guarantee, but increase the probability that their kids don't end up spoiled if they just are having a different childhood? Like, what do you see there from a development standpoint and an environment standpoint?

• 3:19:50Speaker 01

  That's a great question. And I think the way to answer it is to sort of understand what you think your friends mean by spoiled. What do you think they mean by like, "I don't want to spoil my kid," when they say spoil?

• 3:20:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Every single one of them is different, obviously. But if I had to, in the most crude way, outline what they mean, they don't want their kid to be fucked up. Right? Like, and I think what the fear, and again, people just naturally go to the extreme, is you see an actor or an actress's kid, they're, you know, this young kid, and they become a teenager, and next thing you know, you read about them in like TMZ because they're addicted to drugs, or, you know, like the very, very extreme. I don't think that's necessarily, they're like, "Oh my God, I'm so worried that my kid's gonna grow up like in the spotlight," because many of these people aren't public figures or anything. They're more so worried about like, "Will my kid work hard? Will my kid actually understand the importance of learning? Will they, you know, be ambitious?"

• 3:20:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, all these things that I think society generally puts value on. How do they make sure that their kid gets those instead? Is it doesn't just become kind of a shithead kid who's like, oh, my parents will take care of me?

• 3:21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it sounds like being spoiled. And it's true, I was thinking about that. I was thinking about the one, the parents that give their kids anything that they ask for at any time. They don't expect much of them. It's the low sort of expectations to give back to their family or to give back to society. So I think to prevent that spoiledness is to make sure that they have those opportunities to contribute to the society, to their family. Because otherwise, when you just give them things, give them things, and you have no expectation of them to do anything to give back, I think you can then quickly get to that route that you painted.

• 3:21:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's almost like setting the expectation, like expectation setting may be the single most important thing of making sure that the kid understands what those are and also almost holding them accountable to some degree to try to meet the expectations?

• 3:21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, holding them accountable, getting them involved in volunteering or just what they do for chores at home. Sometimes kids grow up with no chores because you resented doing that as a kid. It's important not to do anything reactively, like, oh, to be conscious and think about your parenting sort of strategy and your expectations for your kids, not as just a reaction to what I don't want to do as I had experienced growing up.

• 3:22:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I think every parent would be the world's best parent if their kid didn't have to make their bed.

• 3:22:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, that is the beginning of many kids' existence, like, I gotta make my bed. And then I guess as a part of that, like, my dad used to say this to me, he wouldn't say it directly to me, but he would say it in front of me to people, he would always say, My kids don't need another friend. They need a parent. And it sounds very similar to what you're saying in terms of there's expectations. This like authoritative parent, this like almost demanding but supportive.

• 3:22:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 3:22:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Type thing fits very similar and kind of weaves itself together where the parent should be the parent. And if you do that with any degree of success, like your kid should be okay.

• 3:23:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, should be okay. I mean, like you said, it's that balance of having, having expectations. You know, you being controlled at a certain, you know, for certain things. And then, but you're also a warm, supportive listener, you know, you're there for them to hear things out. If something's going awry, you're just not, and it's just, it's that calm. It's just not being that extreme sort of helicopter. I'm going to control everything you do because, you know, you have to ask yourself, what, what is driving that anxiety and fear? Is it because, you know, you don't want anything bad to happen to them? Well, you know, you have to prepare them that bad things will happen, right? Bad things can happen to good people, good things happen to bad people. Bad people do good things, bad people do bad things, you know, there's just, as long as they're not like having sort of an,

• 3:23:55Speaker 01

  if you're trying to control their whole world and, you know, sort of shelter them from every sort of possible thing that could imagine. They're not going to learn the skills to manage it when it does happen and the world is going to be shattered.

• 3:24:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it, um, it feels scary, I think, to parents to kind of put their kid out in the world. At the same time, it's going to happen.

• 3:24:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:24:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Can't slow down time.

• 3:24:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:24:18Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. My, my last question for you is, you are a trained child psychologist or a clinical psychologist. You have two kids. What do you do with your kids that may surprise people? Or something that, uh, that you do with your kids that you feel is really important? That if you could tell all of your friends who had kids, like, hey, this is the thing I feel like is so important.

• 3:24:44Speaker 01

  Okay, great question. And I will, yeah, I.

• 3:24:49Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of the questions we talked about today was how to set our kids up for success, how to ensure optimal cognitive development across domains, and you know, how to set that up with their activities or with their friends, how do we provide enough to pay for like the best education that they can have, and you know, as a working parent too, you know, and I was well, thinking about all those questions that you asked me, having worries and concerns about those things, when I really, what I really think parents, you know, what I do with my kids are what also helps me is to really play with them.

• 3:25:30Speaker 01

  Let's sit on the carpet and play with them and just be with them, be with them, play with them, you know, there's all that good oxytocin is flowing through everybody, that bonding, and you know, it takes you away from the worries of, you know, making money or being the best researcher you can be, and you know, they're also getting a lot of learning opportunities from you as that, again, attentive, nurturing, supportive caregiver, is just to play, to play, play, play, you know, peek-a-boo, hide-and-seek, be silly, have a blutify, pillow fight, jump on the couch for a little bit, you know, play with them.

• 3:26:05Anthony Pompliano?

  That's it.

• 3:26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:26:07Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a, no matter how much we analyze all of this, it always goes back to the simplest thing.

• 3:26:12Speaker 01

  The basics, right.

• 3:26:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Like literally just love your kid and hang out with them.

• 3:26:14Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, but not be their friend.

• 3:26:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Exactly. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find some of your research if somebody wants to follow up based on some of the stuff we talked about today?

• 3:26:28Speaker 01

  I think the only social media platform I have is Twitter. I have a Instagram, a Facebook, so I'm at Dr. Holmischasek, and I have a practice website, khmsychology.com.

• 3:26:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I know that a lot of people are really looking forward to this, and we'll definitely have to have you back in the future.

• 3:26:43Speaker 01

  Thank you, it was great being here, Anthony. Thanks for having me.