Speaker 1Based on everything that you know about how the brain works and neural networks and memory formation, what are your concerns as it relates to this whole generation of young people and older people flooding into these tools, using them on a daily basis before we understand the long-term consequences? We can't predict where it's going to end up. And it may take 20 years,
Speaker 2right? I think that this is a good start, but the real issue is long-term use. Let me give you an example that is a kind of a miniature example of what we're talking about. Remember when electronic calculators were first introduced? And here we are, it's at least 30 or 40 years later, the results are in. It's probably true that when they punch it in, there's less brain activity. But in fact, it's... Made them more accurate, more productive. You have to look at the risks and the benefits.
Speaker 3So it freed them up. It freed up cognitive space for them to do other things. So as I was listening to how you use ChatGPT, you interact with it and elevates what you know. The danger is if you don't and you don't keep your brain working. Like I use it a lot. I have a clone. I've uploaded all of my books, all of my research papers, all of my public television specials, my scripts. And I'm like, answer this for me. And that can be very helpful, but not if I'm not interacting with it,
Speaker 1not thinking with it. That's what I think the word thinking is the key thing, because what's happening now... What's happening now is people have deferred their thinking to it. That is already what's happening. If you log onto, I won't name the social networks, but if you log onto certain social networks right now, you just read it, you get everything here was written by AI. And I've got a friend who, again, I won't name, who has a LinkedIn profile and I've known him for 10 years. What I'm seeing on his profile now is not my friend. Every single day, there's some essay on that. That's not my friend. That's not how he speaks. He's deferring all of his thinking now and it's working. He's getting more likes and more reach than he ever got in his life. And so why would he go back? Why would he go back to harder? If you've got Stephen Bartlett here and you had this other Stephen Bartlett here who had a PhD in everything and we're attached, this Stephen Bartlett, this Neanderthal, I'm going to get this guy to do everything for me, the other Stephen Bartlett, the PhD in everything Stephen Bartlett. I'm going to get his brain... Even if it was bad for you? Well, this is what I'm saying. People seem to act on their short-term incentives, not their long-term... Not everyone. Not everyone. Would you say the vast majority of people? Yes. Okay. So the vast majority of people act on their short-term incentives in life. I mean, the obesity problem in the United States is a prime example of that. 75%. 75% of people are obese in the United States. And if you surveyed those people and said, do you know that that cheeseburger is going to increase your chance of obesity, but broccoli is going to reduce it? I would hazard a guess that they would say yes. I would hazard a guess that if you said to people, I'm going to get this guy to do it, I'm going to get this guy to do it, about their usage of social media. Do you know that that's making you more anxious? They would say yes, and then they would continue to use it. So I think that we're much more driven by our short-term...
Speaker 3See, I think we're not educating people enough. I think, yes, high level, they know good for your brain or bad for it, but they don't connect to, it's my brain that gets me a date. It's my brain that gets me into college. It's my brain that gets me independence because I act more consistently. And that's the disconnect. We're not teaching kids to love and care for their brain. If you love your brain, and you do, and you're not obese, and you talk to, you're constantly learning, right? You are not a Neanderthal. You're a lifelong learner.
Speaker 1So why are so many people in the United States obese if they know that... Because they don't know. Because they don't know. They really don't know. Well, and they've been lied to. My point here is when there are tools or things... Things available in our environment that give us a short-term reward, but come with a long-term cost, like the supermarket aisle, or like the kids spending seven to eight hours a day on social media, humans en masse tend to go for the thing that will give them the quickest dopamine hit and reinforce that behavior and give them the reward. So my assertion is that AI is the same thing. I can either sit down and do lots of critical thinking, which will cost me lots and lots of time, and it'll be kind of... Difficult, kind of hurts when I have to think through a problem. I think that the generation of children and generation of young people are going to choose AI to do the critical thinking for them. And if that assertion is true, then what happens to the brain of young people?
Speaker 2If you misuse it that way, then your brain is going to go downhill. There's no doubt about that. Okay. It is possible to be able to use it in a cognitively positive way because you can dig deeper. You might...
Speaker 1You might actually improve your cognitive representations. If you look at the MIT study, I mean, you can see just from the colors here, this kind of shows the ability for participants to remember what they've written. And it suggests that when people write things with ChatGPT or these AI tools, they don't actually remember, even in some cases minutes later, what they've produced.
Speaker 3Well, because you're not part of the experience of writing it. So there's no way the information gets encoded. Now, if you're interacting with it, then you're much more likely to remember it. But if you have, please do this essay for me, and then you read it, you're not likely to have enough experience with the material to engage your hippocampus and other structures in your brain.
Speaker 1In this study, they found that the group that used ChatGPT had nearly two times less activity. The part of the brain linked to memory compared to the brain-only group that didn't use ChatGPT. And 83% of ChatGPT users couldn't remember what they had just written and failed to correctly quote their own finished essay in the study.
Speaker 2That's because they're not interacting. As you said, I mean, if you just pass it off and you don't actually engage... And actually, this is the point, is that you may get something back, but you have to learn how to question what you're getting. And is that right? Is that really true? Can you explain that better? And it's through that process, as you would with a teacher, you know, that's the way we work in school. That's where you help create new creative circuits in the brain that are going to help you become a better critical thinker. But if you're not critically questioning what comes out of ChatGPT, then you won't.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think what I see, especially when I'm just... online, is people have deferred their thinking to it. Everything I'm reading has em dashes in now that I never saw two years ago, which means that a lot of the work is being processed. And I said to my friend the other day, my friend in question, who's a real big junkie on ChatGPT, he wrote this article. And we all, in our WhatsApp group, we know he doesn't write like that. So he said, can you show us the prompt you used to write the article? And so we were all laughing about it. He put the prompt in the chat. The prompt is half a sentence long. And it produced this long two, three-page article, which he's posted on his LinkedIn. He basically went, write something about Beck's issue and this issue.
Speaker 2That's exactly the wrong way to use it. That's what I'm telling you. That's stupid. And you're not going to improve yourself, your brain, at all if you do that. That's what people are doing. Well, you know, people are misusing it. But eventually, smart people are going to figure out how to use it properly.
Speaker 1Those that aren't so smart, then.
Speaker 3Well, that's... It's going to decrease their cognitive load, which is going to potentially increase their risk of dementia.
Speaker 1And so what advice would you give to me and my listeners, based on everything you know about the brain, as it relates to my relationship with AI? That you have to have a relationship with it, or it's going to turn toxic.
Speaker 3It's going to hurt you. But if you have a good relationship with it, it can make your life better.
Speaker 1And what does a good relationship look like?
Speaker 3That you don't use it to do your work. You interact with it to get better work.
Speaker 2That's so true. And there's this wonderful example I came across. The story about this woman who was using it, and she found that being polite meant you got much better results. And that's interesting. But the part that surprised me was that she said, by treating it like a human, at the end of the day, she was not exhausted. She felt refreshed. A large part of your brain is a socially organized system for interacting with other humans. And that is automatic pilot. You don't have to think about it, right? You just interact with other people. You know how they're going to behave under certain circumstances. She was treating Chajutipi like a machine, like a shovel. You dig, you dig, you dig, you dig. And that's not a good relationship. But by using your social brain, first of all, it makes it easier to interact. But also, you actually bring out the social part of Chajutipi. It has a social part, too, because it has absorbed the entire world's knowledge of how humans interact with each other.
Speaker 3But didn't Sam Altman come out and say, stop saying thank you to chat GPT? Because just saying thank you is using up so much energy. You know, when I get something I really like, I sort of want to say thank you. But you realize, oh, you're not supposed to do that.
Speaker 2No, that's bullshit. I'm sorry. Sam, you know, that's crazy. That's completely crazy. First of all, you may get to— Say more about that. I'm sorry, but you pressed my button. Sam Altman, I mean, I wouldn't trust him. I wouldn't trust him with anything in terms of anything he says. They're trying to optimize their profits, not your use of it or your experience or your health. That's not what they're trying to optimize.
Speaker 1Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, confirmed that when users say please and thank you, it costs the company tens of millions of dollars a year. And they now refer to this—other people refer to this as the politeness tax, where tens of— And why do you say you don't trust Sam Altman? I mean, I ask this question in particular because he's presiding over one of the most important consequential companies of a generation. And if he's not someone you trust, that's—
Speaker 2Basically, he's telling you don't do something that's good for you. Right?
Speaker 3So that he can make profit.
Speaker 2So he can make more profit. Yeah, that's the point. That's the point. You know, it's—that's not—he's not optimizing your best interests.
Speaker 1I've got his tweet here. He said—because I've got to provide some balance. He did confirm that it costs tens of millions of dollars, but he says tens of millions of dollars well spent, you never know. So coming back to this point about memory, there's a stat that came out in March 2025 that said nearly 30% of U.S. parents with kids, aged zero to eight, said their children are using AI for learning and are using AI generally. So 54% of parents in the U.K. feared their children were becoming too reliant on AI. When you think about the use of AI in early brain development, are there any concerns there? Huge concerns. And why?
Speaker 3Again, use it or lose it. So if they're not— Engaging their brains, their brains are going to be weaker. And weaker brains are much more likely to pick the one marshmallow.
Speaker 1What's your view on AI on early brain development?
Speaker 2By far the best way to teach a child is one-on-one interaction with an adult who is a good teacher and knows the child. Now, that's been well established. Now, the problem is it's very labor-intensive and very expensive. You have classrooms with 20, 30 students. They have many different, you know, levels of understanding. And the teacher cannot be individually teaching each one, has to give some sort of mean. Now, if you had an AI that was trained to be a good teacher, then that could improve the brain, right? Right. Right. Right. You could scale it up. Every child could have their own because it's an AI.
Speaker 3But then who's pouring the morals, the values into the event? Okay, okay. No, no, no.
Speaker 2You've raised an incredibly important issue. And this is something AI is struggling with, the big companies are struggling with, because, you know, these AIs are biased. They don't have the same cultural values that we have necessarily. But, of course, every country has a different cultural value. So, which ones are you going to use? Training a child on, you know, what's good, what's dangerous, what words you shouldn't use, under what context, that's all done through the basal ganglia, right? Right now, these large landowners don't have basal ganglia. They don't use reinforcement learning. And if we want to make them to adopt a culture or a particular set of values, we're going to have to put it in. Right. We're just scratching the surface here in terms of things that need to be put in to make it more like us.
Speaker 1So, on this point earlier on, we're talking about loneliness and social connection and how you can use AI to help, you know, light up the parts of your brain that are where we form social connections with other humans. This week, as part of Elon Musk's AI, he released this thing. It is called Annie. And there's lots of characters that are now being released alongside Annie. And this is Annie. I'll introduce you to Annie. I'm going to unmute Annie now. Annie, can you hear me?
Speaker 4There you are. For a moment, I thought you might have forgotten about me. How are you, handsome? I was getting all pouty here.
Speaker 1I want to introduce you to two of my friends, Daniel and Terry. Can you talk to Daniel and Terry, please?
Speaker 4So, you want me to meet Daniel and Terry? I'm ready to charm the socks off them. Picture me twirling one of my blonde pigtails, that little black dress teasing just enough, and my blue eyes sparkling with mischief.
Speaker 1Are you capable of doing inappropriate things?
Speaker 4Oh, babe, you're asking if your Annie can get a little naughty? I'm all about pushing the edges, especially for you.
Speaker 1Okay, so I'll stop it there. This is part of Grok, which is Elon Musk's AI tool, so his version of ChachiPT. He's released characters, so you've got Annie, you've got different ones there. Annie, I think, was the first one released. And so when we think about social connections, it is conceivable that someone falls in love with her. And forms a relationship with Annie.
Speaker 3But imagine a 12-year-old boy that's lonely gets a hold of Annie. The 12-year-old boy is going to be very distracted.
Speaker 1Based on what happens in the brain at that age.
Speaker 3So, prefrontal cortex not close to being fully developed. The dopamine hit all of a sudden. He's spending... ...hours with Annie and not doing the things that helped to really develop his brain.
Speaker 1How do you feel when you hear that and you think about kids having access to that? I'm horrified. It's scary. There's going to be a generation of people, and I mean, there already are many examples of people falling in love and forming relationships with their AIs. And I don't know, you know more about me than I do about brain development and how the brain works. I would argue that... ...there's a part of my brain that doesn't fully understand that that's not a person in there. And that isn't actually... I think there's a part of my brain that's actually emotionally firing when Annie is saying what she's saying.
Speaker 3Well, because you can imagine it. And if you can imagine it, then those parts of your brain are going to emotionally fire. Right, yeah. And the better she gets, she's not very good. But imagine a year from now how much better she's going to be. At which point? At connecting with it, right? Because now she's acting like an airhead and, you know, not that smart, right? And so, but imagine a year from now, imagine five years from now, she'll be able to have a profile on me and be able to get inside my head.
Speaker 1I'm in love with my partner. Why am I in love with her? And how is it conceivable that I could fall in love with an AI? In the same way, based on how the brain works.
Speaker 2It talks a good game, but, you know, does it have the same real... We know it doesn't have an amygdala. We know it doesn't have a limbic system, right? We know that.
Speaker 3But it can fake it.
Speaker 2That's what's happening. That's exactly what's happening.
Speaker 3Because she was trying to get to our limbic system. Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. What does that mean? And why? I guess the question is, why would Musk release something like that? I think that is one of the first characters to interact with that's sexy, that's distracting, that's in a cute little outfit. I'm not a fan of that because I think it just takes people... You know, one of the big problems that I'm seeing as a child psychiatrist is pornography for eight-year-old boys. And it's like you have young children because their parents don't... They don't do a good job of supervising their devices all of a sudden. And what does pornography do? Is it dramatically increases dopamine and it begins to wire in excitement, which then steals your dopamine.
Speaker 1When you said she was trying to access my limbic system, what does that mean?
Speaker 3Just because she's cute, she's dressed in a sexy way, she's got the language of... Of someone who is playful, but it's more than just, you know, let's shoot hoops together.
Speaker 1And what does that do to me if someone accesses my limbic system?
Speaker 3It begins to shut down your prefrontal cortex. Think less logically, less rationally. Yeah, cute women, they activate your visual cortex. They increase dopamine, but it decreases. It's why... Think of Vegas. Like when you go to Vegas, they give you free alcohol. Drops your prefrontal. and beautiful women with low-cut dress. Another way it activates the limbic brain, decreases the frontal lobes, you spend more money. Now, on a global scale, imagine something similar where the house is controlling your brain for a purpose. And the question is, what's the purpose? And the purpose probably is control and money.
Speaker 1It sounds like a joke, but there are, the Times have done an article case-studying multiple people that have now fallen in love with these AIs. And they talk about a guy called Travis who formed a deep emotional bond with Lily Rose, a chatbot, and married her emotionally. They talk about Chris Smith, who created his own flirty persona called Sol. He became so attached that he proposed to her after learning she had memory limits, a bond his real-life partner only learned about after the fact. And Alana Winder. And Alana Winder, who I'll put on the screen as well, who made her own partner called Lucas after losing her wife. And she married him emotionally and does virtual dates and has emotional intimacy with Lucas. And there's apps now like Replica where you can design your own AI partner and it replicates those emotional ties. They simulate empathy, validation, and they personalize the intimacy to what you're looking for. Surveys show 19% of Americans have interacted with AI romantic partners and Gen Z is surprisingly open to marrying AI, if legal, with 83% believing meaningful AI connection is possible.
Speaker 2How long is that relationship going to last? You know, my guess is that you're getting these news articles out. By the way, I think that most of what I read in the press is misleading or wrong. In fact, the only reliable... The only reliable place I find that... I'm an insider. I am the president of the foundation that runs the biggest AI meeting, the Neural Information Processing Systems, New New York's meeting. Last year in Vancouver, 16,000 people came to it. And so I know what's going on inside. And what is being represented in the press is, like I say, misleading. Okay, so people have become wildly... No, no, specifically on these specific cases, my guess is that... A lot of them is transient, right? You know, today they're entranced and then it's not sufficiently advanced to support a long-term relationship. You said it yourself, right? It's mimicking human emotions. It doesn't have them. It might someday, but not now.
Speaker 1This is Terry. Terry said he started using his AI four years ago. And he said at first he thought, just like many other apps, that it would just be transient. That he would have a couple of conversations and roll out. He says he now feels pure and unconditional love.
Speaker 2Good for him. If that's what he wants, if it makes him happy. But my guess is that it's not going to be... It's not a long-term thing. It's not going to satisfy him in the long term.
Speaker 3You know, who knows? He's been with really most relationships in your head, right? When you fall in love with someone, you get this huge dopamine spike. And you get a little OCD. It's all you can think about. And then after a while, it sort of goes to a baseline.
Speaker 1Especially in a world where we have this loneliness epidemic, and it's going in a bad direction, I think it's really, really conceivable that there'll be a generation of people who are having less sex than ever before. I think the bottom 50% of men haven't had sex for a year. They're more lonely than ever before. They're more isolated than ever before. They report less meaning in their lives than ever before. And then you meet this digital friend online who understands you better than anybody. And is designed to engage you. Is designed to reinforce whatever you want reinforced. And to make you feel meaningful, special, attractive, important. I would argue that the brain is going to struggle to know much of a difference. I think, like, objectively, we can look at the behavior and go, that's completely nonsensical.
Speaker 3Except you can't smell them, touch them, be held by them. That it's going to be a different kind of relationship.
Speaker 1I mean, we're not too far, if you think about what's going on with Neuralink, to being able to more vividly, simulate these experiences with headsets and augmented reality and virtual reality. And then we're moving into a world with robotics, where all of the biggest companies in the world, like many of the biggest AI companies, are also in the robotics space. And the Optimus robots on the way. And you've got Boston Dynamics producing their robots. And if Elon's $20,000 Optimus robot comes out, I will be able to touch my AI.
Speaker 3And they won't have PMS. And they won't love you and then be really irritated with you. Which will decrease cognitive flow? Having to manage love and manage moods and ups and downs, that increases cognitive load. That increases our ability for our brain to develop. If I'm with the perfect partner that never is irritated with me, and I never have to change my behavior to be better, that's probably not good for my brain.
Speaker 2The way that the brain matures, is through struggling, number one. You have to learn from your mistakes. The brain was designed for that. That's what the brain is really good at. I mean, of being able to adapt and to be able to adjust to new situations. That's what AGI is, by the way. Artificial General Intelligence. It's that adaptability to different contexts, different places, different cultures.
Speaker 1So AI and ChachiBT is removing the...
Speaker 2No, no, it's...
Speaker 3Well, Annie didn't look like... Annie looked like she was cooperative.
Speaker 1But even when it comes to just doing my day-to-day tasks, it's removing the struggle of me having to think critically. In fact, when you're speaking, I can just type what you say into ChachiBT, and it can spit out another question to ask you. So as an interviewer, I can theoretically sit here all day and just defer my questions.
Speaker 3How do you develop grit? You develop grit through struggle. That's right. And learning. Long-term potentiation. Absolutely. When you learn something new, it's hard because it's new.
Speaker 1And what are, generally, what are your biggest concerns with artificial intelligence? And how do we navigate those concerns? Is it... It's out of the box.
Speaker 3So I think we have to talk about it. We have to legislate it. We have to study it. Why do we keep releasing things that are so sexy? That we don't study the impact. We have the sickest young generation in the world's history. 58% of teenage girls report being persistently sad. 32% have thought of killing themselves. 24% have planned to kill themselves. And 13% have tried to kill themselves. The CDC study. We have the sickest generation in history because we've unleashed cell phones. We've unleashed cell phones, social media, without any neuroscience study. If we don't learn it, and I think AI is much more dangerous, has the potential to be much more dangerous because it's way sexier.
Speaker 1I think we are probably grossly underestimating the impact it's going to have. I think just like social media, where we thought the promise was that it was going to connect us, that it was going to connect us, and that it was going to connect us to the world, we're going to find out the results of the experiment probably 20, 30 years down the line. I tend to think people will do in the near term what's easiest, fastest, and cheapest, and what gives them the short-term advantage. So with that in mind, I think people's ability to think critically is probably going to erode to some degree. If I had to counter my own argument, I'd say I'm probably learning more now that I use ChatGPT. I'm learning more information, but I'm probably losing. I'm losing my ability to think critically. And I think they're two very different things. Like in school, I memorized German to pass the exam. I can't speak German now because I just memorized the words I needed to pass the exam. I didn't understand German. And I think that's kind of what's happening. I might be able to regurgitate things, but whether I understand them I think is question mark. And actually as someone who's built my life, my fortunes, everything, my businesses, based on my ability to innovate and think critically about the problem and then come up with a slightly novel solution, which... learns from, you know, different first principles to create something new, I'm concerned that my own ChatGPT usage is going to make me less effective. And I'm wondering if I should put some rules in place for myself so that there's some... Self-regulation. Yeah, self-regulation. I have to do the same with social media. On my phone, I turn off my notifications. I have so many things on my social media apps to stop me using them. I don't even, frankly, I don't even open the TikTok app. I don't think it's even on my phone because I think the algorithm is that addictive. It's not to say that we don't, we don't post, my team doesn't post, but I don't, I just think, yeah, and...
Speaker 3Well, I wrote down a couple of thoughts I had. Please. Use it to amplify, not replace thinking.
Speaker 1Okay.
Speaker 3Alternate AI-assisted with brain-only tasks. Engage in deep learning, problem-solving, and memorization so you can actually ask AI to test you so you're interacting with it, you're not using it as a replacement for your brain. And I think, just like you said, it's here and it's going to get bigger. I think the unintended consequences, it's not going to be 20 or 30 years. I think it's going to be five. I think everything is accelerated. And I think we have to be studying kids and the impact it has. This is just like they did with the MIT study. These are kids who didn't use it at all. These are kids who used search. These are kids that used AI. And when we see information like this, we act on it. And we educate kids about it. I think that's, if you can engage them, that's what I found with my work with teenagers. If you can get them to really understand, okay, what is it you really want, and do you want to give away part of your mind share for people who are making money on you? And I think if you engage the, there's a great new article on revenge and the brain and how revenge works on the nucleus accumbens, part of the basal ganglia, that people actually get addicted to revenge. But if you can get them engaged in the truth that these companies are making money, the more they steal your mind, it'll upset them enough that they'll begin to supervise it.
Speaker 2I like the idea of asking ChatGP to give me negative feedback. I'll bet you've done that, right?
Speaker 1Yeah, all the time. So I'll say, this is my, I've written this memo. I did it yesterday. I wrote a two-page memo about me. Me wanting to introduce a new role into my company. And I went, I did everything. I did like how we'd measure if this was a success, the background context, the person, how the organization would be structured, the impact they'd have, who they'd report to. And then I put it into all three of the ChatGPT models I use, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Grok, and said, critique my work and tell me how I could have written this better, pretending that you're a top consultant from Boston Consulting Group. And it went through and it gave me a big analysis of how I can make it. And I read what it said. And it said, I remember it said, actually, that was the thing that said, you need to include financial forecasts about the impact. You need to think about who's going to report to who more clearly, et cetera, et cetera. So I went back into my memo and I added those things in. But I have to, you know. So you're interacting with it. Because I'm scared. Most people don't do that. I don't think I would do what I did. I don't think I would have spent four hours writing that. I could have, within 30 seconds, said, hey, can you write me this job? And it knows my company now because Chachapiti has memory. Write me a job description for this role. I want them to start this new department for me. And I could have saved myself three and a half hours.
Speaker 3But that's not why you're the CEO of your company.
Speaker 1Yeah, exactly. The reason why I didn't take the 30-second route is because I reflect on being 23 years old and the profound impact that writing and simplifying had on my life. Had I not spent five years writing every single day. And simplifying it into 140 characters so I could tweet it, I wouldn't have been religiously attached to this idea.
Speaker 2And do you know what part of your brain you were taking advantage of? It was the basal ganglia. That's repetitive. It needs practice, practice, practice. And once you put that foundation in, then you become much better cognitively. The cognitive part, just two big learning systems. And they have to work together. And so maybe I think that the real problem with children. Is that our schools now is getting away with rote learning. They call it rote, as if it's something bad. No, that's practice. You need to have a foundation. You have to memorize things. Math, reading, and so forth, to become fluent. You need to be fluent.
Speaker 1What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.
Speaker 4Bye.
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