Your Kids Don’t Need More Achievement. They Need More Freedom | Dr. Peter Gray - EP 826

Dr. Peter Gray, evolutionary psychologist and author of Restoring Childhood, explains why children need freedom, play, and independence to develop agency—and how modern parenting and schooling may be undermining their ability to thrive.

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

• 0:01John R. Miles?

  Hey friends, what if your biggest problem isn't that you're not doing enough, but that you've spent too long proving that you are enough? You can be successful, needed, and surrounded by people and still feel completely unseen. That's the problem I explore in my new book, The Mattering Effect. I show you how we become hyper-visible for what we produce, while quietly becoming invisible to ourselves, and introduce the matter framework to help you reclaim meaning, autonomy, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity. Stop auditioning for your worth, start living from it. The Mattering Effect is available for preorder now at matteringeffect.com. What if we don't discover our passion by figuring out what we want to do with our lives? What if we discover it by playing?

• 0:46John R. Miles?

  As children, we're constantly experimenting. We follow our curiosity, we make things up, we explore what interests us, and somewhere in that process, we begin to discover what matters to us. But what happens when we take away that freedom? What happens when childhood becomes less about exploring the world and more about preparing for the future? Dr. Peter Gray has spent decades studying childhood, play, independence, and human development. And he argues that one of the most important things children learn through play is how to take charge of their own lives. So I asked him, "How do you actually discover your passion?"

• 1:31John R. Miles?

  His answer was simple: "Take a listen."

• 1:34Speaker 01

  How do you discover your passion? How do you discover what's meaningful to you? What matters to you? You discover it as a child in play. You play at this, you play at that, you play at various things, you acquire kind of a broad understanding of things by playing and exploring in various ways, but then something really hits you. "I love to do this." "Right? I really love to do this." And you do it enough that you become good at it.

• 2:06John R. Miles?

  Hey, it's your friend John, and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it.

• 2:46John R. Miles?

  Welcome back to Passion Struck. This is episode 826, and we're continuing our series, "The Adaptive Human: How We Thrive in a Changing World." Over the past several conversations, we've been exploring the forces that shape who we become. Angela Duckworth showed us that our situations can bring out different versions of ourselves. Marty Slidman reminded us that agency begins with the belief that what we do can make a difference. David Epstein challenged us to see constraints differently. Cole Brouwer showed us what adaptation looks like when there's nowhere to hide from the decisions in front of you. And Marissa Franco took us inward to our relationship with ourselves, our memories, our sense of worth, and the parts of ourselves we've learned to ignore.

• 3:32John R. Miles?

  But today's conversation takes us back to the beginning. Where do we first learn that we have a say in our own lives? And perhaps more importantly, where do we first discover what matters to us? My guest is Dr. Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist and the author of Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety. Peter argues that childhood isn't simply a period of preparation for adulthood. Its deeper purpose is to help us gradually become more independent, to take increasing charge of our own lives. And one of the primary ways children do that is through play. Play gives children opportunities to explore, solve problems,

• 4:16John R. Miles?

  negotiate with one another, make decisions, and experience what it feels like to be the author of their own activity. In other words, play isn't just preparation for life. In many ways, it's where we begin learning how to live. And that connects directly to something I've been exploring in The Mattering Effect. What happens when we grow up in environments where our choices, interests, and contributions gradually stop feeling like they matter? Peter and I get into that question through the lens of childhood, agency, independence, passion, and meaning. And I think you'll hear why this conversation isn't really just about children. It's about all of us. Let's get into my conversation with Peter Gray. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck

• 5:01John R. Miles?

  and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 5:13John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Peter Gray to Passion Struck. Peter, it's such an honor to have you on today's show.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  It's an honor to be here, thank you.

• 5:22John R. Miles?

  And I am so excited about your upcoming book, Restoring Childhood. What made you think that now was the best time to bring the book out into the world?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I suppose you could say that the best time to bring it out would have been whenever I was ready to bring it out. It wouldn't have hurt to bring it out sometime before now, because the problem that's described in the book has been going on for a long time. I wrote a book called Free to Learn that was published in 2013. Quite a different book, but in many ways overlapped with the thesis of my new book, that children have not been allowed to be free, to be themselves, and that this has had disastrous effects on their psychological well-being. I already had that idea out there. I've been writing academic articles about it.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  I've been doing Psychology Today blog posts, and then more recently, Substack letters on this topic. So it's been a topic on my mind for a long time. When it came, when I had the space now to write a book, this was the book I wrote, Restoring Childhood.

• 6:37John R. Miles?

  Thank you for that opening. As I have read the book, and I read your previous book, because I actually used your research in my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, it seems to me the larger question you've really been asking is this: What is childhood actually for? If we misunderstand the purpose of childhood, do we inevitably misunderstand how to raise children?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  I'm glad you... That's a very basic question. That's where we need to start. I'm a biologist by background. I think about human behavior from a biological point of view, evolutionary biologist. And so, all mammals, including our children, are born totally dependent on parents or other caregivers. Absolutely, totally dependent on them. The whole purpose of what with mammals is called the juvenile period is to become independent. So, the goal of, if you are, or the task

• 7:44Speaker 01

  of the juvenile period, or what we call childhood when we're talking about human beings, is to gradually become more independent, gradually take increasing charge of our own lives, gradually do more and more of what adults do in the culture. And so, that's what childhood is. The reason we humans have a fairly extended juvenile period compared to other mammals is it takes us longer. We in some sense have to develop more. We have to acquire more information, more skills than other animals do. And so, we have a somewhat long, we have a longer period than other mammals for this.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  So, every species of mammal, including human children, are born at some level of their being knowing, not consciously knowing, but in their DNA and in their brains, knowing that their job is to assert their independence to the degree that they can, beginning even in infancy. By the time they're two, their favorite word is "no." "I'm not going to do what you're telling me to do right now." Or, "I want to do it myself," when parents want to do it for them. And this is healthy.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  This is what children need to do. In the past, we understood this. I'm old enough, I was a child in the 1950s. And I think that whether it was conscious knowledge or just a general understanding that children need to be independent. If your child is five years old and is not walking to school by themselves, that's a problem. We need to encourage them to get out and start doing these independent... That was the way parents talked back in the 1950s and even into the 1960s. So, over time, for a variety of reasons, we have lost sight of that.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  And we are preventing children, actively preventing children from asserting their independence, being more independent, taking more responsibility for their own lives, doing increasingly, especially as they enter the teen years, increasingly adult-like things, being gradually accepted into the adult world, still being treated like children, even into their late teens and sometimes into their twenties.

• 10:27John R. Miles?

  Thank you for explaining that. And I wanted to go one layer deeper into this from an evolutionary standpoint. So for much of human history,

• 10:40John R. Miles?

  up until recent years, we were hunter-gatherers and we existed within what Robin Dunbar's work calls tribes of 150 or less. What happens now to a child when they've entered an arena that really doesn't have walls and now expands to a global presence of billions of people? How does that affect a normal childhood?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  I think that you could say that the child is entering a world where there's so many people and so on and so forth. On the other hand, the child's world is not all of that, right? The child's world is their family, their friends, the neighborhood, the kids they're going to school with. I don't think it's so radically different for the child. But of course, as children grow up and they're growing up in this larger world, depending on who they are, depending on what interests they develop, they may or may not become concerned with the much larger issues of the world as opposed to just the issues

• 11:49Speaker 01

  that are related to their more immediate sphere of activity. I don't see that as a particular problem. I think that the big issue that is the difference between the way children in hunter-gatherer cultures grow up and the way our children grow up, at least if we're talking about band hunter-gatherers, which are the hunter-gatherer groups that survived into relatively modern times and have been studied by anthropologists, is that they are not told what to do. They are, I've written, I did a study, actually in the late 1990s,

• 12:31Speaker 01

  along with one of my graduate students, where we surveyed 10 anthropologists, all of whom had lived in and studied hunter-gatherer cultures. In the mid 20th century, it was still possible for anthropologists to trek out and find people still living in a relatively pristine hunter-gatherer type of way. And so we identified anthropologists who had done that in various parts of the world, seven different hunter-gatherer groups. And what we learned is that in every one of these cultures that these anthropologists studied, at least, children were free to play and explore all day long.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  There's nothing like school. Children were trusted to essentially educate themselves. So I think that's the big difference between a hunter-gatherer culture. I think that when you look, one of the reasons I was interested in children in hunter-gatherer cultures is I'm interested in what is the biological basis for children's drive to educate themselves, to learn what they need to know? And so I thought through most of our, essentially all of our history, we were hunter-gatherers. I would learn something about that by looking at how hunter-gatherer children are treated and how they learn.

• 13:55John R. Miles?

  I want to move here now to the topic of play. So you grew up in the 50s, I grew up in the 70s and 80s. And even for me, when I was growing up, from as early as I could remember, my school was half a mile, maybe three quarters of a mile away. And I would walk both to and from school. I would go to school and we had morning and afternoon breaks. And then we had a large lunch break. And so some of my biggest memories from school were playground activities, where we were doing unsupervised play and sometimes it would lead

• 14:37John R. Miles?

  to fights on the playground, sometimes it would lead to football games, sometimes it would lead to playing hopscotch, what have you. And then after school, my mom would just say, when it gets dark, come home for dinner. And so we would just go out and explore the world. How does that model compared to what's happening today influence childhood development?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  This is much of what my new book, Restoring Childhood, is about. What you are describing is what I would call a normal childhood. I had a normal childhood also a couple of decades earlier than yours. And this is what the way children throughout the world, except in times of slavery or times of intensive child labor, this is the way children have more or less always grown up. Exactly the way they play varies from culture to culture and so on and so forth. But children historically have always been free to get away from adults, to play with other children. And it's through that kind of play that young people learn how, children learn how to take charge of their own activities.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  When you're playing out there with other kids, no adults are around, think of the problems you have to solve. You have to figure out how to get along with those other kids. You have to figure out how to deal with minor bullying, which is inevitably going to occur to some degree. You have to negotiate your play with your playmates. You have to create rules and figure out how the, among those of you, you're going to enforce the rules. If you've got rules, you're playing some kind of formal game, pickup game of baseball. What are the ground rules? All of this is extraordinarily important learning for your future well-being because these are lessons that apply to all of life.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  When there's an adult there doing that stuff for you, when that pickup game of baseball becomes Little League, you're not learning any of that stuff. You're being a puppet. You are being controlled by an adult. The adults are solving your problems for you. You are not acquiring the skills that you need for a successful, independent life as you grow up. So that's extraordinarily important. One thing, what you're describing has been well documented. There are two books I know of on the history of American childhood. One is by Howard Chudikoff. And he describes the first half of the 20th century.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  He considers the turning point to be 1955 for reasons of his own. The first half of the 20th century as the golden age of children's play. By the beginning of the 20th century, we had pretty much done away with intensive child labor. We had compulsory schooling, but it was nowhere close to the big deal it later became. And so children had a lot of free time to play, explore, to get into trouble, figure out how to get out of trouble, all the things that children do as they're growing up. But according to Chudikoff, and this is consistent with my life experiences, I was a child in the 1950s.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Ever since about 1955, adults have been gradually chipping away at that freedom in various ways. In my new book, I describe 11 societal changes, all of which reduced the likelihood that children were going to spend time outdoors after school and play with other kids, reduced the chance that parents would allow them to do that, increased the incentive to go home and do things at home alone instead of being out playing with other kids. So it's not just one thing, it's a whole set of societal changes that led to that.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Interestingly, that corresponds precisely with data on changes in the mental health of young people. The mental health of young people has been, declined continuously throughout the 40-year period between 1950 and 1990. Almost linearly, the rate of suicide quadrupled during that period for teenagers, rates of anxiety, depression, to the degree that we can estimate them from standardized clinical questionnaires, given in normative groups, increased about five or sixfold. Huge changes, huge declines in mental health between the 1950s and close to the end of the 20th century.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  That in my writing, I bring lots of evidence that this is what you would expect if you take normal childhood away from children.

• 19:37John R. Miles?

  We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Dr. Peter Gray. As you're listening, I want you to think about one question. When was the last time you did something simply because it mattered to you? Not because you were supposed to, rewarded for it, or expected to succeed? Peter's work reminds us that we don't discover what matters to us by having someone else hand us the answer. We discover it by exploring, by trying things, by following our curiosity, and by having enough agency to find our way toward what feels meaningful. That's the theme that runs deeply through my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect. Because one of the questions I'm asking is what happens when the environments around us gradually teach us to prioritize

• 20:20John R. Miles?

  what we can prove, produce, and achieve over what actually matters to us? The Mattering Effect comes out October 6. You can preorder at matteringeffect.com. If this conversation is giving you something to think about, subscribe to Passion Struck wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe to the YouTube channel if you're watching there. Now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 20:49Speaker 02

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• 22:16John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck, right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Peter Gray. If that is the baseline, what then happened when No Child Left Behind and some of these other programs came about? Because to me, there was really an inflection point there where it was almost like we started to take things that you would see in the work environment around analyzing kids' performance and other things and started taking them into the classroom.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  So, No Child Left Behind was passed in the 1980s during the Reagan administration, modified somewhat by Obama later on. But it really took teeth, beginning in 2010. That's when states began to take it seriously. And most states got together, most states, in order to satisfy the federal requirement that schools be evaluated based on students' test scores. States got together and created what they called the Common Core State Curriculum. And most states adopted this Common Core State Curriculum, beginning in 2010.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  By 2013, it was pretty much fully implemented in most states. There were a few states that didn't adopt it, but they, to meet the federal requirement, adopted their own system, similar to Common Core. Basically, what Common Core did is it disempowered teachers. Basically, what it did is it said, "Everybody teaching a given course has to be teaching the same curriculum as everybody else teaching that course, and all the students are going to be tasked on the same task. Moreover, teachers and principals and whole schools

• 24:16Speaker 01

  are going to be evaluated based upon the test scores." That was the basic change. As you can imagine, this had a disastrous effect on teachers, on schools. Teachers, the best teachers, felt like they were not being appreciated. Teaching is an art. Teaching in the schools that we have depends upon your wisdom, your ability to understand the children that are in your classroom, to adapt what you're doing to their needs, to engage them intellectually. You can't do that if you're teaching Common Core. You can't do that and expect everybody's going to do well on the same test. The test is just an arbitrary set of stuff.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  "Why that stuff?", a good teacher would say, "as opposed to what my students are interested in." Good teachers know how to engage their children, engage the children intellectually. And that became difficult. Many of the best teachers resigned at that point. I have a sister who resigned at that point. She had been a very happy teacher, loved by the students. But once Common Core hit, she was no longer allowed to teach the way she knew was best, and she resigned. I began to hear from teachers all over the country that they were resigning, especially in the early years, especially kindergarten teachers, who really felt they were harming these little children by doing what they were doing. So, Common Core had a disastrous effect.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Not surprisingly, beginning with Common Core, the rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide began to increase at a slope even greater than what I described as happening in the 20th century. And it is clearly, the data, the evidence is overwhelming that Common Core was the main cause of that increase in suffering among children. School has always been the primary source of psychological stress for children. Every single study that I've been able to find in which children themselves are asked, "What is it that's stressing you out?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  What is it that makes you anxious or depressed?" Every single study, school comes way out on top. School pressure, nothing else comes close to school pressure. And so, it should not be surprising that if you make school pressure even more than it was before by a federal mandate carried out by the states, that mental health would decline even further in school-aged children.

• 26:55John R. Miles?

  Thank you for all this background. I want to switch gears just a little bit and talk about agency. Because as I was reading the book, to me, agency is something that sits in the background of it. So, I recently interviewed Marty Siligman, who has a new book coming out called Agency. And in it, he argues that agency may be one of the most defining forces behind individual flourishing and also the progress of society. And reading both books and talking to him, it strikes me that your work asks an earlier question. Where does agency begin?

• 27:39John R. Miles?

  And does agency begin in childhood? And if it does, do the things that we are discussing take that away from children?

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's really agency that we've been talking about. I've got two new grandchildren. I've been watching them as they're growing. They're now a little bit more than a year old, each one of them. They have agency right from the beginning. They're taking charge of their activity. They're exploring their environment. They're doing things all the time. They're doing things. So, agency doesn't have to be learned. Agency is innate, but we can suppress it. And we do suppress it. And we especially suppress it in school. But we also suppress it with our parenting techniques, the kinds of ways that society has encouraged adults, parents, to control their children's behavior, not let them do what they want to do,

• 28:37Speaker 01

  not let them go out and explore, not let them take charge of their own life because we think it's dangerous, or we think they'll get in trouble, or there's various reasons why we don't allow that agency. When you are out there playing with other kids with no adults there, you are exercising agency. You are exercising the ability to take charge of your own activities, to coordinate with other people, to figure out what you're doing. There's a term somewhat similar to agency, which is used by clinical psychologists, called internal locus of control. There are actually tests for locus of control.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  And basically, it's a test of to what degree do you believe you are in charge of your own life? In what degree do you believe you can deal with the bumps in the road of life that hit you? Or to what degree on the other... So, that's called an internal locus of control. Or to what degree do you feel like you're a victim of all kinds of circumstances around you? Things, bad things happen to you. You can't control them, nothing, you know, you're a victim of bad parents, whatever the heck it is, you're a victim of that. And that is called external. Of course, most of us are in the middle.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  But it turns out that what clinical research has shown is that those people who are even unrealistically on the internal end, they believe they can control their fate, do better psychologically. As life goes on, they're much less likely to become anxious or depressed. They're much more likely to take active measures to solve problems as they arise than those people who are more on the external end of the spectrum of locus of control. But basically, internal locus of control is the same thing as agency. One thing we know, because there be...

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Throughout the second half of the 20th century, really beginning in the 1960s, normative groups of school-aged children, particularly in the middle school to high school age range, were given a standardized questionnaire assessing locus of control. Research on those scores over years has shown that external locus of control has greatly increased. That means internal locus of control has greatly decreased in young people over that period of time. So, the same period of time in which we've been taking away children's opportunities

• 31:23Speaker 01

  to play independently of adults, not surprisingly...

• 31:28Speaker 01

  We have seen much, a much less strong internal locus of control. Really, another word for that is less agency over time. I don't know of any direct measure of agency that's called a measure of agency, but I think it's the same thing as these tests of locus of control.

• 31:49John R. Miles?

  Are you familiar with Alexis Redding, who's a professor at Harvard?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  What is the name?

• 31:55John R. Miles?

  Alexis Redding?

• 31:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:58John R. Miles?

  She has also been studying the youth mental health crisis. And what is interesting is she has been studying it through the lens of college students. And she went into it thinking that since the 1950s, the things that they are struggling with would be far different than what students are struggling with today. And she stumbled upon some research from Perry at Harvard that was never used, that analyzed his studies from the 50s. And then he interviewed students again in the 70s.

• 32:40John R. Miles?

  And what she found was that these historical data sets actually showed that what the students were experiencing in the 50s and 70s are exactly the same things that they're now experiencing in the 20, in the 2020s. And she is really not seeing any difference at all in how they were responding to things such as feeling depressed, feeling anxious, feeling lonely, et cetera. So she contends that there really isn't any difference between what she is seeing now, based on her data sets, and what was seen in the 50s and 70s.

• 33:25John R. Miles?

  How do you respond to something like that?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Of course, I'd be interested in that data. It's interesting. It'd be nice to know what the questions are. The issues faced by college students are, in some sense, different from the issues faced by younger children. College is always, especially, and also I would be interested, are these first year college students? Are they second, third, fourth year college students that the data come from? First year of college is often a very stressful time. You are maybe for the first time getting low grades, especially that was true. You're, and the first time, you're away from home and you're out of your comfort environment. You're trying to adapt to a whole new set of people. The anxiety and depression of first year in college is longstanding.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  My mother talked about that when she dropped out of college her first year and never went back. And so that would have been in the 1930s. So I think that in some sense, the experience of college students, especially early on, perhaps hasn't changed as much as others. On the other hand, there is no question but what? If you, when you look at the survey data, when you're asking kids, even college students, about their levels of anxiety and depression, when you're directly assessing that, whether it's by self-report or whether it's by giving them clinical questionnaire, the data are clear that for college students, as well as younger people,

• 34:59Speaker 01

  the rates of anxiety and depression have gone up.

• 35:03John R. Miles?

  Let's go back to childhood then for a second. I think parents today often feel like an enormous pressure that they have to optimize every aspect of childhood.

• 35:16John R. Miles?

  And my question to you is, when beyond school, did childhood become something to manage instead of something for them to experience? And then what happens psychologically when this happens? When adults begin solving too many of the problems that kids need to discover on their own earlier in life?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  So I think that this burden that parents take on of trying to manage their children's lives, trying to be aware all the time of what they're doing, worrying all the time about what effects this or that might have on them, worrying about their future, trying to gear their lives so that they get into the most expensive college they can get into. All of this is referred to by researchers as intensive parenting. And intensive parenting first became a thing. It began, that term actually came around by researchers as early as the 1980s.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  But in the 1980s, it was primarily a practice of very wealthy parents who could afford to do it, could afford to hire people to help them do it. But the very wealthy class of parents began to take on this sense that I need to gear and steer my children towards success in the world. And these are parents who were successful themselves. They were wealthy. They were successful. They wanted to be sure that their children also were that way. And I think this began to spread already in the 1980s, by the 1990s.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  I think this was already spreading to a greater number of people, including people who actually couldn't afford it. They couldn't afford the money and they really couldn't afford the time to do everything that the intensive parenting prescriptions say that you're supposed to do. But they still believed that they should do that and they felt guilty if they couldn't do that. There's been documentation of this in various ways over time. I think one of the factors that contributed to this is the increased gap of wealth between the rich and the poor. It began really during the Reagan administration. The decline of labor unions, the change in the tax structures

• 37:51Speaker 01

  that favored the rich and as, at the expense of the poor, greatly increased the gap between the rich and the poor. There are a couple of economists who've written a book comparing, they've done research comparing across nations and over time. And their thesis is, the greater the gap is between rich and the poor, the more parents begin to believe that they have to ensure that their children are on a track to get good jobs. And they believe that entails hard work in childhood.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  They believe that entails doing well in school, excelling in extracurricular activities. In other words, parents begin to think of childhood not as a time of free play and creativity, but as a time of resume building. And the parents are going to take charge of that resume building, make sure the children do the things that they need to do to build a good resume. I think it's a logical argument. I think that did figure into it. It's not the only thing, but I think that figured into that kind of change that occurred.

• 39:09John R. Miles?

  I think, I have two kids who are college plus age. One is 28 and he just finished his second degree and is currently a senior at the University of Florida. And as I was looking back, one of them ended up going to a prep school for high school. The other one went to a public school. And it was interesting, the one who went to the private school, there was an immense pressure from the private school for them to try to get into the best school that they possibly could. So a big push to try to get into Ivy League or equivalence. We didn't feel as much as that push in the public school, but the younger of the two put enormous pressure on herself

• 39:54John R. Miles?

  to try to do that same thing because she equated that if she was going to have success later on in life, she needed to get into the best school that she possibly could, which I think is a common thing that people think. Do you think in some ways that is what is driving this? That there's this feeling that you have, not just here in the States, but I see the same thing in Great Britain. I see the same thing in India. Same thing when I talk to people who are from China. That getting into these premier schools is what's going to dictate your success later in life? So you have to grind in order to accomplish the things that allow you to get into them?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is what people believe. I think to a considerable degree, it's a myth. There's actually been research showing that if you control for background factors, you control for economic class, you control as well as you can for innate abilities. And then you look at those, when you created these sort of artificial matched twins, if you will, and one of them goes to Harvard or its equivalent, and the other one goes to the local state college. By age 40, the research shows,

• 41:17Speaker 01

  They're earning the same amount of money. Even by that measure, they're earning the same amount of money. There was no advantage to going to Harvard. There are some advantages to going to Harvard in the recruitment stage, but there are also advantages called the big fish in the little pond effect of going to the lesser school where you stand out, you get great recommendations, you get invited by the professor into the laboratory and so forth. So it's a bit of a myth that you're going to be far better off. Now, nobody ever believed that you're going to be happier in life as a result of going to the prestigious school. Nobody ever argued that, as far as I can tell, and there's zero evidence for that. There's never been any evidence for that.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  So if you judge a successful life by, am I happy? Am I content with my life? Am I comfortable in my own skin? There's no benefit to going to the more expensive prestigious college. So, parents have been misled. There's a way, the problem is, people don't understand the distinction between a correlation and a cause. So when you look at correlational data, of course, kids who went to Ivy League schools are at least on, at least superficially, by measures of money, by measures of status, doing way better than those who went to the local college.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  But, they also came from far wealthier families. They were different in disposition to begin with. They were people who cared about status and money. That's part of why they went there, and so on and so forth. It's not a reasonable comparison. It's only by doing those controlled studies that you can say what really is the Harvard effect, as opposed to what is simply a correlate of those who happen to go to Harvard versus those who don't. So that's number one. The other thing I want to point out here is there's a researcher named Sonoia Luther, who unfortunately died a few years ago, way too young,

• 43:26Speaker 01

  and who, she originally was a professor at Columbia Teachers College, and she was doing research on the mental health of teenagers. And originally, she had been doing research in the inner city, I believe, probably in New York City, of children, of young people, teenagers in poverty. And she was finding relatively high rates of anxiety, depression, alcohol use, drug abuse, and so on and so forth. And the way she told the story, the way she tells the story, is that one of her, and she was attributing it to poverty, but one of her graduate students, the way she tells the story, chatted around that, said, "Well, how do you know it's poverty? What's your control group?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Maybe kids from wealthy families are similarly suffering." So, she did a study, she did a same study among teenagers in Westchester County, which I believe is the wealthiest county in New York State. She found higher levels of anxiety, depression, binge drinking, illegal drug use among them than she did among the poverty kids in the inner city. And it changed the direction of her research. At first, she was calling this a problem of affluence. She attributed it somehow to growing up in an affluent family.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  But the more she did the research, the more she realized it isn't affluence per se. It is the pressure that's applied to kids, particularly by the school that they're going to, but also by the parents who are pushing the kids to do well in school and achieve in other ways. She found that, and she began to identify what she called high achievement schools. Some of these would be private prep schools, but others would be public schools in wealthy neighborhoods, all of which are schools that pride themselves on how many of their graduates go on to elite colleges,

• 45:40Speaker 01

  how high the test scores are and all of that. And therefore, the schools are motivated to get you into those colleges, to get those scores high, and that means pressures on the kids. What she found is that it wasn't just in, if you're going to that kind of a school, it wasn't just the kids from wealthy families. There were also kids in those schools, a certain number of kids in those schools who are not from wealthy families. And they were suffering just as much as those from wealthy families. And there were some kids from even wealthy families who were not suffering so much. So what made the difference? And what she determined was, the difference was

• 46:20Speaker 01

  the degree to which the kids were being pressured by multiple sources, not only by the school, but by the parents themselves. The kids who were protected from this were those who had parents who really did not care how they were doing in school. Truly did not care. Where you'd sit around, enjoy, the family enjoyed you for who you were. They weren't trying to make you into something that you were not. If you decided, "I don't want to go to college", they would be fine with that. Those are the kids who are not suffering. And she also, we were talking a little bit earlier about college students,

• 47:03Speaker 01

  she and some of her colleagues followed some of these kids through college, and they continued to suffer in college at much higher rates than other college kids who had gotten there with less pressure to begin with. It's this kind of pressure for superficial achievement that children are experiencing, largely it's school pressure, but it's not just in school. Kids are feeling pressured to do well in extracurricular activities, to get onto the traveling team, to win, to be, to... Colleges like, the elite colleges, where everybody's got a 4.0 average when they apply.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Everybody's got the highest scores on the SATs that you could possibly get. So then they begin to look at, well, what are they doing outside? And what, what clubs are they president of? What sports teams are they starring in, and so forth? So the pressure on kids is not just to perform well in school, it's to join all this other stuff that takes all their time, and then they feel pressured about that, about performing well. This is really, in my mind, this is child abuse, what we're doing. This kind of pressure on young people to perform in these kind of superficial things. These are not real achievements. It's not a real achievement to get high grades in school. It's a very narrow kind of achievement, has very little to do with life.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  It's not a real achievement to make that sports team and be a star in it. That has very little to do with what your future life is going to be, unless you're going to be a professional athlete, which is only a tiny minority of young people for whom that's going to be true.

• 48:46John R. Miles?

  Well, I am so glad you brought her research up because I cited her several times in my upcoming book as well. And you are right, her life was taken much too young, unfortunately, because I thought she had so much more, in addition to what she had already worked on, to contribute. So Peter, one thing, speaking of this, I want to ask you about is, when I went into trying to understand all this, and trying to understand in many ways what was happening to my kids, but what had also happened to me, because I ended up becoming what we're describing here, when you're taught to achieve, to earn your worth. I didn't go into this to study mattering.

• 49:30John R. Miles?

  I went into this to understand what was underneath all of this. But the farther I got into it, I started to try to explore whether agency and mattering reinforce one another? And do children become more agentic because they feel they matter? Or do they discover they matter because they're trusted to act independently? And when we put all of these forces upon them, as opposed to the family where they're treated as they matter because of who they are, does that weakening of mattering

• 50:14John R. Miles?

  start becoming a root cause of what's happening here?

• 50:18Speaker 01

  So I haven't thought about mattering to the degree that you certainly have. But I think that it relates very much to self determination. If you are feeling in charge of your own life, if you are doing what you have decided to do,

• 50:39Speaker 01

  generally you feel you matter. You've decided to do this because in some sense, why did you decide to do this? Because it matters, matters to you at least. If it doesn't matter to anybody else, at least it matters to you. So when people, I think about it, so I noticed that the title of your, of your podcast is Passion Strike or something like that. You've got the word passion in there. So I've been very interested in how young people develop passions. And I'm convinced that our schooling system prevents children from developing passions. Because yet your passions don't count, your interests don't count when you are in school. All that counts is what they tell you're supposed to do.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  So I have spent part of my career studying children who are growing up unschooled, who aren't going to a typical school, who are homeschooled by the method commonly called unschooling, which is a bad term because it sounds like they're not being educated. But basically where they are allowed to take charge of their own learning, make their own decisions about what they're learning, when they're learning, how they're learning, what they're doing and so on. And I've also studied children in schools for self-directed education, especially the Sudbury Valley School where my own son went to school many years ago, where the philosophy is that children learn best when they are directing their own activities,

• 52:05Speaker 01

  children are not segregated by age, they're interacting with one another, they're in charge of their lives from the beginning.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  One of the things I've found in studies of the graduates of that kind of a school, as well as grown unschoolers, is that by and large, they are in jobs that they love. How did this happen? Because while they were children, they had ample time to play. Play and explore, how do you discover your passion? How do you discover what's meaningful to you? What matters to you? You discover it as a child in play. You play at this, you play at that, you play out of various things. You acquire kind of a broad understanding of things by playing and exploring in various ways.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  But then something really hits you. I love to do this, right? I really love to do this. And you do it enough that you become good at it. And then if you've been in this kind of environment where you're used to making your own plans, you're not, you don't have other people making all your plans for you, you begin to think, all right, now I'm a teenager. It won't be too long before I'm going to have to make my own living. How do I want to make a living? I want to make a living doing what I love to do, what matters to me. And so I've documented a high percentage of these people.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  I've studied about 150 such people. And a very high percentage of them, they are going on into careers that are direct extensions of their passionate interests. Those careers matter to them. Sometimes it matters to them because they see that it's doing good for the world. That's actually pretty common. Other, but also because they've chosen, this is not only is this what I like to do, but it's something where I'm actually contributing to the world. But other cases, I'm an artist. People may or may not enjoy my art, but my art matters to me. That's what I am, that's what I identify.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  I think that clearly there's a relationship between this sense of I'm in charge of my life. All this, so many of these concepts overlap with one another. If they're not identical, at least they overlap. The self-direction, the whole self-determination theory. When you have agency, when you're in charge of what you're doing, as opposed to just doing things to please other people, then it feels like it matters.

• 54:49John R. Miles?

  I have a pivot point now. I have spoken to Richard Ryan on multiple occasions. I understand self-determination theory very well because it was one of the two core frameworks I used in my book to kind of architect how I was thinking about mattering. And as I told you, I recently had Marty Seligman on the show. And we spent a significant amount of the interview discussing the youth mental health crisis.

• 55:21John R. Miles?

  And Marty told me something that really surprised me. He said that going in to his research and his new book on agency, he expected that declining agency and his decades of work on learned helplessness were going to explain what we're seeing about the youth mental health crisis. But he told me that over the past six to nine months, he's been using artificial intelligence to analyze huge amounts of historical data sets and that he has reluctantly, very reluctantly, come to the conclusion

• 56:01John R. Miles?

  that Jonathan Haidt's explanation that social media is the stronger driver currently fits the evidence better than what he thought would explain it. And so where I want to go with this is, Peter, if all three of you were sitting together at a table and you all three agree we're facing a youth mental health crisis,

• 56:29John R. Miles?

  it seems where you disagree is about causation.

• 56:34John R. Miles?

  What evidence would you put on the table to the other two that you think they're overlooking?

• 56:41Speaker 01

  So it's hard for me to respond to what Seligman is saying because I don't know the data and I haven't had a chance to look at that. But I can clearly respond to what Jonathan Haidt is saying. So what is the evidence? So first of all, what Jonathan Haidt ignores is the fact that the rates of anxiety, depression and suicide among teenagers in the United States was as high in 1990 as it is today. As high in 1990 as it became at its peak in 2018. It's actually gone down a little bit since then.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  And so there was a decline in anxiety, depression and suicide at all age groups, most significantly in teenagers because these things tend to show up more in teenagers than in younger children. Not a decline all the way to 1950s levels, but about 40% of the way back. I present this data in my book, I've presented it in some of my other writings. Almost nobody talks about that. So 1990 was before the internet. We didn't have any of this technology in 1990. Why did things improve over the night between 1990 and 2010? They actually improved.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  The only thing I can come up with, I've looked at every possibility and what I come up with is technology improved it. Kids had already by 1990 been greatly stifled from being able to play and explore and do things independently of their parents. Already the, a lot of the changes that I've talked about that had occurred.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Beginning in 1990, they had a new way. By the early 1990s, most families with teenagers in the United States had a computer. And by the middle of the 1990s, certainly by the end, most of them had an internet connection. In those families, and there's research showing this, the teenagers were the ones who figured out how to use that stuff. And they taught their parents how to use it, and the great majority of families. I can speak from experience. My own son was the one who learned how to use the early Apple computer and showed me how to use it so I didn't have to type on a regular typewriter anymore. I experienced that and families across the country experienced that.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Suddenly teenagers had a new power. And they quickly learned that they could use this to communicate with their friends through early versions of what we now call social media. They could play video games, which are real play. There's a lot of research showing this is real play. I think that's what accounted for the improved mental health over that period. And there's a lot of research demonstrating that, including at least one study by Richard Ryan, in which he showed that these video games that the kids were glomming onto satisfied the three basic needs of self-determination theory. The need for autonomy, the need for competence,

• 59:58Speaker 01

  and if you're playing socially, if you're playing multiplayer games, the need for connections with your peers. So he's even written about that. So that makes a lot of sense. I've looked at various other possible explanations and they simply don't hold up. This one seems to definitely hold up. There's also data showing, studies at that time, showing that those kids, if you control for background factors, control for other factors, those kids who are on computers, communicating with others, playing games on computers, were doing psychologically better than those who were not. So then, what happened in 2010? So Jonathan Haidt wants to say it is because this is the era where

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  most kids now had smartphones. So they're not only using a computer, a desktop computer or a laptop computer at home, but they're carrying around this little computer, which is with them all the time and which is distracting them from other things. It's leading, so you know the whole arguments that he presents. It's a logical argument. It's plausible. The problem is the data do not support it. The data clearly do not support it. I've looked at, there are four kinds of studies that have been done, hundreds of studies that have been done, which overall do not provide support. Jonathan Haidt's book, he hired a research assistant to dig out the data

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  and the research assistant found a few studies that seemed to support that theory and that's what went into the book. The book doesn't even refer to the meta-analyses of studies, the large, the reviews of studies, the peer-published reviews of studies. It doesn't refer to the people who are actually doing this research, with one exception, and that's somebody who has done a minimal amount of that research. So, and not surprisingly, the book has been criticized by essentially all the people who do research in this field. The first review of it was by Candace Ogers in the journal Nature,

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  in which her first couple of paragraphs of sentences were something like this. Jonathan Haidt has written a very scary story that parents are inclined to believe because it fits what they already believe, but it's not a story supported by science. And then she went on from there. This is what I also agree and this is what many other researchers in this areas have pointed out. Here's some of the lines of evidence. When you look overall, there is no meaningful correlation between how much time a child or teenager is spending on smartphones or on social media or on screens in general, no matter how you look at it.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  There's no meaningful correlation between that and measures of their mental health. You can find particular small studies where there's a positive correlation between that and good mental health, others where there is a correlation between that and bad mental health. But when you look at the large studies, the better-designed studies, when you look at the meta-analyses of all of the studies, no overall effect, no meaningful effect. So that's one finding. A second finding is that, and to me, I'll skip a couple of the other categories of findings because to me, the most significant finding is this. This is an American phenomenon.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  This increase in anxiety, depression and suicide that occurred between 2010 and 2018 is an American phenomenon. It did not occur worldwide. Smartphones and social media were rolled out worldwide. Kids in Europe are not deprived of smartphones and social media. They glommed onto it just as our kids on. They're basically on the same social media platforms as our kids are. They're using computers, they're using smartphones in the same way as ours. While suicide rate among young people was increasing steeply in the United States,

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  in the European Union, it was actually declining between 2010 and 2018. You don't see that data in Jonathan Haidt's book. There are worldwide studies showing no relationship between when this technology rolled out and teens got onto it and changes in teen mental health. Overall, there's no relationship. Now, what I talk about in my book, I looked, are there some other countries that showed an increase in anxiety, depression and other measures of mental problems among young people around the same time that occurred in the United States? And I found two other countries for which that was true. There may be some other countries for which this is true,

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  but two that I found that clearly this is true is the UK, particularly England. But the data are for the UK, but England is about 80% of the UK, and Sweden, interestingly. What is similar between the UK, Sweden and the United States? All three of those countries showed experience, nationally mandated changes in how schooling is done. The UK, especially England, it wasn't all of the UK that adopted, but England adopted a change in schooling very similar to Common Core and so did Sweden. Sweden adopted it about the same time as we did.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  England adopted it three or four years later. Interestingly, their increase in anxiety, depression among young people began three or four years later than it did in either Sweden or the United States. In other words, changes in young people's mental health tracks changes in how we do schooling. It does not track changes in the availability of technology to young people.

• 1:06:18John R. Miles?

  Thank you for that counter-argument. My own research, where I've tried to look at this objectively and I am not a researcher like you are, or Slugman is, or Haidt, is when I looked at this objectively, I started to look at it as a signal issue. Where did we start losing the signal? And I traced it back all the way to the start of the Industrial Revolution. And what I come to a hypothesis is that the signal has been reduced through reducing childhood freedom, reducing academic pressure, increasing parental anxiety,

• 1:07:03John R. Miles?

  declining opportunities for agency across youth, and then a systematic erosion then amongst all the institution that we surround ourselves around, which is why it continues to cascade even beyond childhood now into so many adults' lives. Because whether it's our governments, our workforces, consumerism that Aaron Iuvia studies or other things, they're all eroding more and more of our individuality

• 1:07:46John R. Miles?

  and treating us less as a human and more as a utility. And that's what I've come to believe is causing this to cascade now from youth into adulthood and beyond. Do you think any of that is also true?

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  I absolutely do. I think that is true. But I think that when we're talking about looking at a sort of more time-limited examples, why were there changes between 1950 and 1990? Why were there changes between 1990 and 2010? Why were there further changes between 2010 and 2011? What you've described is a background that sets the stage for those changes, sets the conditions that allow these kinds of societal changes to have these effects on people. And I think that's absolutely true. It's interesting regarding what you're saying. One of the things that I learned from the anthropologists who studied hunter-gatherer children and hunter-gatherers in general

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  is these people are remarkably well-adjusted. They don't have anxiety and depression. This is, some people call it a Western phenomenon, but it's a kind of a modern phenomenon from the long history of, of. I've also had an interesting experience. I really got first interested in the changes in children's well-being over time when I was giving a talk in Florida and I met a young woman who had come from Kenya. She was native of Kenya, had come from Kenya at age 16. And she came up to me and she said,

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  "The first thing I noticed when I came to America from Kenya was how unhappy people are, and especially how unhappy the children are." She also added how unhappy the dogs are. She said, "They're all on leashes. They're all on leashes." Kids and dogs and everybody in Kenya is much, are much freer. They're, they are in poverty, they're suffering from, but they're not suffering psychologically the way people are in the United States. And then I met other people from what we now call developing countries, where they said the same thing. They said, "We came to America seeking a better life and, but we see that the children are less happy here than they were in the country that we came from."

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  And I began to think, "Well, what are we doing to make the children so unhappy?" And led to my really beginning to look at the historical changes that have reduced children's opportunities to be free and do what children need to do and the effects that has on their psychological well-being, on who they become growing up, whether they develop passions, whether they go, whether they develop lives that are meaningful to them, that matter to them. I think that there's no question that there's something about. The modern wealthy societies, if you're looking at psychological suffering as opposed

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  to physical suffering, people are suffering more in modern wealthy societies than in societies that in some sense are still pre-industrial.

• 1:11:10John R. Miles?

  Peter, my last question for you is this, we have talked a lot about what has been going wrong. What brings you hope about the future? And what are things that parents who may be listening today could do to change a lot of the trajectory that we've been discussing?

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  In my last chapter, the biggest chapter of my new book, I talked about some beginnings of positive changes. And I talk about what people, regardless of their position in our society, could be doing to restore childhood. And there are some promising things happening. For example, there's an increasing number of schools which are adopting what we at the Let Grow organization call Play Club, which is hour of free age-mixed play before school or after school, where there's a, there are people supervising it, but not intervening, allowing, making it safe enough so parents feel it's safe for their kids to play there.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  There are libraries starting to have free play at the library. There are some recreation groups are beginning to say, let's instead of just have all organized sports, let's have what we might call the Sandlot Experience, where you show up and you make up your own game if you're going to sign up for that. There are people involved in town planning who are beginning to think about, we need to make plans that will make it easier for children to get to school by themselves and safe enough that parents will allow. We need to make bicycle paths. We need to make sidewalks. We need to put over major highways. We need to put pedestrian and cycling paths over them. This is not the movement it should

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  be, but it's an incipient movement. And there's also, I believe, increasing awareness among parents. Admittedly, I hear from a biased sample of parents, the people who read my stuff and respond to me. But at least from that sample, I believe that there's an increased awareness that their children need more free play, more independence. And I make suggestions to parents about how they can promote that. One of the things, I have a whole list, and one of my Substack posts, I list 13 things you could do to bring more freedom and independence to your children's lives, even in today's world. But one of the things, I'll just have

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  time for one of them, is sit down with your kid and say, are there things that you would like to do independently that you're not doing right now? Maybe you're not doing it because you haven't really thought about what you would like to do. Maybe you're not doing it because you think I wouldn't allow you to do it. Maybe you're not doing it because it might be a little bit scary. And, but other things, and make a list of them. And then to sit with that list and think, okay, I think it would be great if you did this. Or maybe your desire to ride your bicycle to the other end of town, I'm not quite ready

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  for you to do that, but let's compromise. You could ride here or there independently. So to engage your child in a conversation about what they would like to do independently without a parent or other adult there guarding them along the way, telling them what to do, protecting them, and then allowing them to do it.

• 1:14:35John R. Miles?

  Thank you so much, Peter. Where's the best place for listeners to learn about all your amazing work and your books, et cetera?

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  I do have a website, which you can easily find, a personal website, just petergray.org. And it lists my books. It also shows how you could, if you're interested, preorder my new book. It has of most interest to many people. There is a page that has links to many of my published academic articles. And don't be scared by my calling them academic articles. They're written in a way that any literate person can read and understand. And so if you're interested in my research and my academic writing, most of the articles

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  that are relevant to what we've been talking here are available free downloadable there. I also write a regular Substack called Play Makes Us Human, and you can easily find that. Just Google Play Makes Us Human or Peter Gray Substack, in which I try to write a post letter once a week, or sometimes it stretches out to 10 days, but it's almost always a kind of research-based one. I'm not a person, generally speaking, to just talk off the top of my head. I'm a researcher by nature. I want to document things. I want to talk about what do the data actually tell us as opposed to what our intuitions tell

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  us? Because our intuitions are very frequently wrong.

• 1:16:11John R. Miles?

  Yes, they are. Good way to end. Thank you so much, and congratulations on this wonderful new book.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:16:25John R. Miles?

  I hope that conversation with Peter Gray gave you a different way to think about childhood, agency, and even the way we discover what matters to us. One of the ideas I found especially powerful was Peter's argument that passion isn't something we necessarily discover by sitting down and deciding what we want to do with our lives. We discover it through exploration. We try things. We follow our curiosity. We become absorbed in something. And over time, those experiences begin to reveal what genuinely matters to us. In that sense, play isn't simply preparation for life. It's one of the ways we begin to discover who we are. But that raises a bigger question for all of us. What happens when the world around us changes faster than the way we've learned to navigate it? Because

• 1:17:09John R. Miles?

  the challenges of adaptation doesn't end when childhood does. In many ways, it becomes even more important as we move through adulthood, when the environments we work in, the technologies we depend on, and the assumptions we build our lives around can change faster than we realize. And that brings us to our next conversation with Alec Litowitz, an investor, entrepreneur, and author, who has spent his career looking at complex systems through multiple lenses, from mathematics and anthropology to law, business, and markets. Our conversation took us into a question that I think sits at the heart of this entire series. Is adaptability simply the ability to keep up with change? Or is it the ability to recognize when the

• 1:17:51John R. Miles?

  direction you're moving in is no longer the right one? Alec gave me an analogy that stayed with me. He described what happens when the current, the wind, and the world around us are moving rapidly. You can be working incredibly hard, surrounded by other people who are working just as hard, and still find yourself moving in the wrong direction. Sometimes the most important thing you can do isn't to swim harder. It's to lift your head up and understand what has changed. Take a listen.

• 1:18:19Speaker 03

  When the current's moving fast, when the wind is moving fast, when the world's changing super fast, what do you need to do? You need to lift your head up. Because you could be swimming with another group of people exactly, super fast, in the absolute wrong direction. Things are changing so fast. If I'm on the wrong course, who cares if I'm swimming with another group of people? Blockbuster was swimming really fast, giving you popcorn and raisinettes inside a store that was selling you DVDs. Wrong frame. Netflix had the frame. It doesn't matter. Adaptability is what says you're touching true reality as it is right now. And without it...

• 1:18:54John R. Miles?

  That's in our next episode on Thursday. Until then, remember, the better we understand the forces shaping us, the more intentionally we choose how we respond to them. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion struck.