Assembly Select Committee on Developing Pathways to Purpose for Young Men

Good morning. I'd like to call to order this hearing of the Assembly Select Committee on developing pathways to purpose for young men. I'm Assembly member Avelino Valencia, Chair of the committee, and it really is a privilege to convene our inaugural hearing today. I wanna thank the members of the committee who are here today with us, and additional members will join us as legislative business allows. A few housekeeping items, this is a public informational hearing televised and streamed on the Assembly website.

We will take public comment after our two panels. To preserve the safety of everyone here and ensure the public's access to this discussion, please follow the directions of our sergeants who are here to help us and to keep us safe. Young men and boys in California are really struggling, and the data is telling us that they need our help finding direction and purpose. Young men now make up the majority of California's disconnected from work and school.

Young men aged 20 to 30 are spending less time outdoors than individuals in prison.

Father absent households have doubled since 1960. Boys without a father are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated and less than half are likely to graduate college. Only one in four young men in California is on track to earn a bachelor's degree by their mid twenties. Nearly one in four men 30 report having no close friends. That is a fivefold increase since 1990.

Boys are less likely than girls to graduate from high school or college with 2,400,000 or more female than male graduates in The US as of 2022. Men account for three or four deaths of despair. Men are three times more likely to be addicted and 12 times more likely to be incarcerated. And most heartbreaking of all is that young men and boys are four times more likely to commit suicide. These are not just statistics.

They are our sons, our students, and our neighbors. And for me, this work really is personal. Everything I know about being a man, I learned from people who showed up for me, and that includes both men and women.

My father specifically kept me grounded and showed me that being a man means taking responsibility for the people who count on me. My family's small business, a grocery store, where I grew up working and where I learned the values is that stay with me today. Hard work, showing up, and taking care of the people in front of you. My football coaches who taught me discipline, accountability, and what it means to be a part of something bigger than myself.

The mentors who gave me second chances and pushed me towards an education. There were people in every part of my life who shaped the man I am today and continue to strive to be. And those people are the reason I decided to give back to my community. Before I ever held office, I was a football coach and worked in education. I stood on the sidelines of the football field and in a classroom.

I saw up close what happens to young men that have someone in their corner, and they also happen to see what happens to those that do not. And that's exactly what the committee is about. Because today, far too many young men and boys are growing up without that support. And more than their formative hours and far more of their formative hours are spent online than at any point in history. When young men disconnect from school, from work, and from one another, the consequences extend to the broader community.

They reach every family, every community, and every corner of our economy. That is why this select committee exists, to shed light on the issue and have these difficult conversations in a public setting with experts and policymakers. It is also why I authored AB 1956 to make sure that young men and boys are a priority in the state's suicide prevention efforts.

It is why we will keep building real pathways to purpose through mentorship, through education, through developing leadership, and by redefining and reclaiming in our young men what it means to be a productive contributor to society. Technology is the entry point for this first hearing because it occupies so much of immense development these days.

But let me be clear, we are not here to condemn technology either. We are here to understand how these digital environments are changing the way young men connect, learn, and grow, and how that is shaping their ability to succeed. We will hear from two panels today. The first will give us an overview of the state of young men online, and the second will focus on designing better digital systems for young men.

I'd like to now turn it over to my committee members who are here for their respectful opening remarks.

Mister Alvarez?

Thank you, Mister Chair, and, those who are here. Really appreciative of the opportunity to serve, really actually excited that the Chair has invited all of us to participate, but certainly to be a myself to be a member of this committee. I I listened and reflected a little bit as I was listening, Mister Chair, to your comments about your personal, your lived experience and how you're bringing that to this conversation.

And and I think it becomes for personally for me at at no better time as I've been engaging with a lot of members of our communities where this topic has really surfaced as a concern in our community.

And also, no better time personally as a father of a now middle schooler, a 12 year old, which is so in the thrust of this developmental stage that is impacted by everything that happens in the world, including, obviously, the topic before us today, which is the use of of technology and how that has an impact in one way or another in the lives of of young men.

I also come at this not just as a father, but as you were speaking about your experiences in the men who've helped and people who have helped shape who you are, as a dad of a Little Leaguer, just, you know, as you were speaking in my mind, it was images of going to those little league games and all the coaches who volunteer their time to support all young people, but in particular, with Little League, oftentimes, much more young men to have a positive positive role models, but also activities happening in their lives.

And so I think I also wanna take the moment to acknowledge that there's a lot of people who are doing amazing work, either serving as mentors or coaches, to try and provide those opportunities for young men that that go unrecognized and unnamed. And they do it for years and years and years, and they're amazing people, and they help really shape our our children's lives. So I wanna acknowledge them. Also, come at this from Chair of the Education Subcommittee on Finance.

And as we make investments in education and there's a crossover between investments and policy decisions, as a father of a kid who was in kindergarten and during COVID and saw the rise of technology, personally have come to try and better grasp what that has meant for the development of both of my children, my my daughter who's older, but also my son.

And the struggles as a parent to deal with such a powerful tool and being able to find the right balance to between screen time and non screen time. Probably, I don't know if you're a parent, it's probably the biggest struggle you face and how it's taken over the course of the last year, now getting very personal, just not providing access to a piece of technology, essentially restricting that use because of what we had personally seen as too much of time being spent on devices.

And how hard it is to do that, but also how it is possible if you're consistent as a parent. But it's a lot of work, and it's a lot of struggle.

And for working parents, and you got one of the parents who's away for four days out of the week, it becomes even a bigger challenge. And so I wanna thank you again, Mister Chair, for allowing us to have this conversation, to learn from people, to have a discussion, to understand what are the things we can do better to help inform other policy. Like, for example, in the space of of education, we went to the use of technology really heavily after COVID.

I've had a lot of thoughts about that, and I would love to hear from the panelists on your thoughts on the reliance now on a lot of the use of these tools, technology, and screens particularly, and how that can be impactful in one way or another to our young people. So thanks to in advance to the panelists. And once again, thank you, Mister Chair. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Assemblymember Alvarez. Miss Bauer-Kahan?

Thank you, Mister Chair. And I so appreciate the opening comments of both of my colleagues. As the mother of a high school young man, I guess I'll call him, and a middle schooler, a 12 year old boy as well, as well as a a daughter who just started high school this week.

This impacts all of our communities, you know, and I think it is so critically important we're having this conversation and it you know, as we as you both were speaking, reflecting on the people in my boys' lives who, whether it was a band teacher for my son who's now a musician or my son's soccer coaches who have made such an impact on him or their grandfather who's such a huge part of their lives and has worked hard to teach them how to express emotion and be empathetic and lead in a way that touches everybody in a positive way.

That's all wonderful. While at the same time, our kids grew up at a time where they were at school on a screen for almost a year of their lives. And so screens were not an option. They were how they connected. Playing video games with your friends was how my then fifth grader was able to keep friends in his life for a year. This was not a choice we made.

It was the reality of the COVID, situation that we were living with. And how that has affected them, I think, is something that we continue to grapple with, whether it was my kindergarten at the time or my fifth grader at the time. But it is something that we as lawmakers, as policymakers, I think it is so critical we're having this conversation.

So I really wanted to begin by thanking you, Mister Chair, for convening us, for inviting me, you know, as the Chair of the Privacy Committee tasked with, creating safe online spaces for kids here in California. We've spent a great deal of time trying to understand the impact of social media and AI on our children, whether it's the algorithms that, push extreme content to our children or the chatbots that they are now turning to instead of human connection, we know that it can lead to tragic results.

And so it is our job as government, frankly, to create safe spaces for people. And last year, our committee, set out actually to hold a hearing. We had heard from a lot of female gamers about how they didn't feel safe in gaming environments. And that was really what struck us. Let's let's look at that.

Let's be hearing about that. And as we started to research it, one of the things we realized was that the algorithms were pushing extreme content to in ways that led to these unsafe spaces that our men and boys potentially were in spaces that were toxic and negative, and we started to explore that.

And actually at the end of the hearing took a turn to the people, especially here in California, who are working to create the alternative, safe spaces online, places where you can connect with real humans, where you can find a mentor, where you can get out and hike.

And I think that it was a true arc of these online spaces can be really detrimental to our children and to their growth, and we have the power to shift that dynamic and to make these safe spaces less extreme, less addictive, and more connective. And so I think this conversation is really important, and I think it's important for the men and boys who are the focus of this hearing.

But I wanna say that when we have healthy men and boys, our girls and women thrive too. And so this conversation is focused on how we help our men and boys thrive, but I think it's important that we acknowledge that it will benefit all of California. And so it's really a privilege to be here and to be having this conversation and to be looking at how we can create solutions that better enrich our youth. So thank you.

Thank you for that Assembly member, and I could not agree with you more on that sentiment perspective and and push through the work that you've done as Chair of Privacy. You're absolutely right. This is a collective effort that needs to be accomplished, and one's benefit is the other's promise, and the other's promise is one's benefit.

So very much look forward to that productive conversation taking place as opposed to having these issues addressed in silos that often leave gaps and then lead us right back to where we started. So thank you for that.

Thank you, Mister Chair. And I wanna thank the comments from, the other members as well too. While I do not have sons, I have two daughters, but I grew up in a family of four brothers. And as many have said, video gaming was a thing back then. And so as we look at it now and how it has shifted, and it's even more in their lives, and it's at the touch of their hands these days as well too.

Assemblymember Nguyen.

It has really shaped the way, the upbringing, the growing, the influence socially in their lives. Prior to being here, I ran a nonprofit organization that was around working with our direct community, and I was fortunate enough to be around when the alliance of boys and men of color was started so that we can shape policies around boys and and men. But also during that time was when the administrate the Obama administration had started My Brother's Keeper.

And so I was around for that as well too because I saw how there were so many things that were impacting our young men and our boys. And that as you talked about mentorship, as you talked about having an opportunity or having somebody in your life that can help you and guide you in the right direction.

We saw that as an issue that there were a lot of boys and young men who didn't have that and that the whole initiative was pulling everybody together over 200 different organizations, mainly here in California, where folks really believed in this and saying that we needed to find policies and shape policies that were going to be able to help our boys and men. And that now as we look at that, and that was many years ago, things have changed a lot.

And it is around this whole social gaming and video gaming and whatnot. Who would have thought that that was going to be the new area in which we had to concentrate in and look in and that that would take over and consume their lives? And in this decade, it's at the beginning, right, of now.

You know, every young kid has an Ipad already. At the age of eight months old, you see parents giving them an Ipad or a digital device so they can watch, you know, at the touch of their hands.

And so, I'm I'm really honored to be asked to serve on this because it brings me back to my roots of when Aye, was working directly with community based organizations and having these conversations and talking through it and then talking about the different type of policies that would be right to be able to address a lot of these issues that we see coming up and a lot of new issues.

And as I read through the briefing that was sent to to my office, you know, you you think of the different areas that affect our boys and men, but then you don't necessarily think about this gaming aspect of it. Right?

And so it really did open my eyes to other areas as well too. So thank you so much for for inviting us to be a part of this and having this discussion.

Thank you, Assemblymember. And just wanna acknowledge and commend your work and expertise coming from the nonprofit sector. As we well know, California is a robust economy with a robust budget. We pride ourselves with reinvesting those dollars back into our communities, whether it be via social programs or nonprofit work. But that's just one piece of the puzzle in my opinion.

I really do want to expand past a funding and revenue solutions oriented approach and really start thinking about these issues in terms of how we systemically change what's foundationally been set in society. Right? And maybe the solution isn't more dollars to nonprofits. That part of the equation again, but there are foundational pieces in society that I do think need to be reshaped and considering and now consider the new way of being through society, which is the digital space and technology.

So with that, thank you all for your comments.

We will now begin with the first panel, which is labeled as the state of men online, how are young men actually spending their time online, and what does the research tell us about what that time is doing to their development.

Our respective panelists are David Sasaki, boys and men online director for the American Institute of Boys and Men, and Kian Brajwaj, who is the k through 12 co chief policy director for Generation Up and doctor Alok Kanojia, also known as Doctor K online, president and founder of Healthy Gamer. Please, if you all could join us.

Yeah. Microphone working? Great. Alright. Chair Valencia, members of the committee, thank you for having me here.

I relate so much to your opening comments as you'll hear throughout my comments, and really celebrate them. I direct the boys and men online program at the American Institute for Boys and Men, and we come to this work neither as critics nor champions of technology. We simply want to study the evidence of where technology harms and helps young men and encourage more of the former and less of the latter. I'm sure that we all have young men in our lives.

We heard about some of them in your opening comments.

And I wanna focus on one young man, 24 year old, who's actually a composite of several young men that I know in my life, and I think that he will remind you of some in yours as well. So let's call him Alex. He was born in Fresno, and he was 15 in the spring of 2018. The smartphone that he had carried in his pocket since middle school had long provided him ubiquitous access to a new world of unprecedented access to pornography.

The average boy now first encounters pornography at age 12, according to research by Common Sense Media, well before his first date or his first kiss.

Boys are more likely than girls to consume pornography and much more likely to create AI generated pornography content themselves. But only twenty percent of boys report ever having discussed AI generated sexual content with a trusted adult. And so our collective avoidance as adults of a fact based honest conversation about sexually explicit media online means that we are failing young people. They are navigating an always available 24-7 accessible world of sexually explicit media, including on social media.

For Alex and his classmates, any awkward approach, any inevitable rejection is a typical high school experience of adolescent romance was preceded by years of experience of a product that simulates intimacy and offers the excitement of sex without building any kind of romantic knowledge, any kind of social skills that would help him actually land a real date in person.

He was 17 in the spring of 2020 when his prom and his final baseball season were both canceled during COVID. We know this is a crucial time for adolescents. This is when developmental psychologists tell us that we build our social skills, how to flirt, how to resolve conflict, how to repair relationships, and how to be a supportive teammate. But Alex and his classmates spent much of that year at home staring at screens, as several of you have mentioned in your own experience with your children.

He was 18 during his first freshman year of college when campus sports were still shut down.

And that healthy sense of competition that he got on the field, that sense of belonging that he felt in the locker room, they both migrated to a group chat with his friends where they would talk up their bets on sports betting websites, offshore sports books. He was under 21 and California has not legalized sports betting, but that hasn't stopped many adolescent boys from betting on sports, especially on college campuses now where prediction markets are advertising, even in states that have not legalized sports betting.

36 percent of boys, 11 to 17, gambled in the past year according to research by Common Sense Media. And when he wasn't betting on sports, he was betting on crypto. He was 19 during the 2021 crypto mania phase.

You probably remember this. He was checking coin prices overnight. He was watching his friends post screenshots of their windfalls, but never their losses. 38% of men aged 18 to 29 have traded crypto versus 15% of women the same age. And FINRA's 2024 investor survey found that sixty one percent of investors 35 make investment decisions based on influencer recommendations from social media.

That is especially true for young men of color. But like many of you have commented, it wasn't all bad online. During COVID, gaming was how Alex did connected to his friends. 97 percent of teenage boys play video games. It's a pretty wild stat according to a Pew survey of teenagers, as do 73 percent of girls.

But boys spend way more time on average doing it. Ten 55 percent of boys say that playing video games has helped their friendship compared to 30 percent of girls who say the same. So we should really recognize the benefits of some of these technologies while also being mindful of possible risks.

What are some of those risks? Well, first of all, the friendships that Alex continued and formed online through video games did not necessarily translate into the same types of offline relationships that he formed throughout little league and playing baseball in high school. The kinds of friends who would show up when your car breaks down. Second, the video games themselves have changed quite a bit over the past decade. This is no longer going and buying a cartridge.

In game purchases increasingly use casino like mechanics that simulate gambling and prime teenagers for gambling. Throughout all of this coming of age, Alex was searching for what a man is supposed to be. Growing up, he heard a lot about what he shouldn't be, about what he ought to reject. Those are essential messages, but he received much less guidance about what he ought to aspire to. Only one in four of his K through 12 teachers was a man.

The most consistent male voices in his his life were surfaced by social media algorithms that are not primed to build character or educate, but prioritize provocative content. Each of these platforms met a real need for Alex, and that's what makes them so compelling. Pornography offered a simulation of intimacy and the excitement of sex. Gaming offered a sense of belonging, competence, and achievement. Gambling and crypto offered risk status and the alluring possibility of overnight wealth.

And influencers offered identity and guidance. But meeting needs is not the same as developing life skills and relationships that give our lives real meaning. So where is Alex today, now at 24 years old? Nothing catastrophic has happened to him. He lives at home with his parents.

He does some gig work, and any money that he gained during crypto during the crypto mania has since disappeared into prediction markets. He games most nights with people he's never met in person, and he has hardly dated. As Chair Valencia reminded us, one in four men 30 have no close friends, just a fivefold increase since 1990, and Alex is one of them.

A newer stat from a comment from a Making Caring Common report that just came out shows that 42 percent of Gen Z adult men say they don't feel needed by others. When those men were asked what makes them feel like they lack meaning or purpose, the most cited factor above any other was excessive and unproductive use of technology at 52 percent.

No single moment in Alex's life would have triggered any kind of intervention. He didn't make unusually bad choices. His parents didn't tell him. He simply accepted the default of how he grew up. And those defaults are what good public policy can change.

So I'd like to transition and close with just a few examples of what we're seeing from other jurisdictions, not as prescriptions, but as evidence and inspiration that defaults are changeable. First, the attention economy could fund the connection economy. Maryland enacted the First Nations tax on digital advertising revenue in 2021 and directed proceeds to education. Austria and other European countries have done the same.

A modest levy on digital ads in California could support youth sports and mentorship programs like the governor's men's service challenge, which we are proud to partner on.

Second, we ought to be very vigilant about gambling mechanics wherever they appear, including in video games where young people are exposed. Belgium banned loot boxes, and Australia now requires that any games containing them include mature age ratings. In 2018, four states in The United States, including California, introduced legislation to regulate loop boxes. Unfortunately, none of them passed. And four years later, nearly half of eighth grade boys reported to having purchased a loop box in the past year.

Third, we can push back on the sudden and pervasive normalization of gambling in this country. The UK adopted a whistle to whistle ban, so no ad betting ads during live broadcast when young men are likely tuning into sports. Italy went further. They banned, sports gambling advertising completely. And Ontario, Canada barred athletes and celebrity influencers from gambling ads in 2024.

Fourth, pornography does not have to be the default for how boys learn about sex and intimacy. Last year, England updated its guidance for relationships and sex education, which includes required teaching on pornography's distorted portrayal of sexual behaviors and how to treat sexual partners. That same framework also requires schools to help boys find positive, models of masculinity and warns teachers against language that stigmatizes boys.

The California Healthy Youth Act already mandates sexual health education in grades seven through 12 and could be updated to address pornography and AI generated sexual content directly. So none of these reforms are about taking things away from young men.

It is about giving back, restoring the offline experiences that were taken from them, and putting in safeguards so that a bad night doesn't jeopardize a young man's future. Alex didn't abandon a flourishing young life for the Internet. Rather, the offline institutions that provided that support in his life receded, and digital products rushed in to meet those basic needs. This committee has the power of policy to change the defaults for the generation following Alex, those young men now in middle school and high school.

Taxes on the attention economy can help fund offline spaces and programming that cultivate a young man's sense of purpose and belonging.

A few updates to California sexual health education can prepare boys for our current reality, which is an online ecosystem awash in sexually explicit media meant to entice, not educate. And proper guardrails and restrictions can push back against the normalization of online gambling and its resulting harms. I am grateful for your time. Thank you for the invitation and welcome any questions.

Thank you. Now we'll hear from Mister Brajwaj.

Chairman Valencia and members of the committee, my name is Vihaan Bhardwaj, and I'm here representing Generation Up, California's largest youth led political advocacy organization. Before I begin my remarks, I want to note that we, at Gen Up, wholeheartedly believe that the legislature has a vested interest in listening to the perspectives and lived experiences of California's young people. For sharing that belief, and more importantly, exercising it by having us here today, we are deeply grateful.

Local and national media have recently devoted considerable attention to the harms associated with technology and their correlation with the worsening youth mental health crisis. Because those trends are already familiar to this committee, I will not spend my time to merely restate them in general terms.

Instead, my remarks will center on my own lived experience and that of my peers across three distinct areas of focus. First, the varied ways in which the aforementioned harms actually manifest in and encroach upon our lives. Second, why in my experience, those harms operate differentially and in certain cases with greater frequency when the when specifically considering the young male population.

And finally, I would like to touch on the stakes of this issue and why the risks of harmed young men contain a magnitude and immediacy that we often fail to recognize. Technologies that my peer and I interface with on a daily basis are harming our lives at a speed we do not realize and at a scale we cannot comprehend.

Our brains at last, are still developing. And for most large technology companies, whether their product is social media, artificial intelligence, or gaming, that is a feature and not a bug. My own experience with social media is a testament to the saddening reality.

When I first gained access to platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and X at the age of 11 or 12. I was simultaneously undergoing the physical changes of puberty, capitalizing on the insecurities that came with that transition for me, particularly around acne, which adolescent boys experienced more severely than other any other group. The algorithms in front of me hyperfixated on my condition, and why and how I was at fault for it.

They convinced me that the natural process was a self inflicted one, and it was only remediable to the products and routines that in the advertisements and content that I was targeted to and shown.

For obvious reasons, that exposure was mentally debilitating. Looking back, it likely worsened my condition just because of the fear and oxidative stress that it caused. Some might say that my peers and I should simply develop more resistance and mental fortitude in response to exposure like this. But what we would be resisting are experts with decades of experience in behavioral psychology working carefully to capture and manipulate our attention.

So I don't think it's fair or even possible to expect us to young young minds to resist that. Shifting forward slightly later into adolescence, I've seen and experienced another example of such an entrapment.

A large proportion of my peers, including myself, are exposed to fitness content that for our developmental phase contains mostly implausible examples of muscular development. We are at a loss in two important ways. First, we sell our time and attention to influencers who with whom we share almost nothing in common, least of all age.

Second, we buy what we are sold, supplements, routines, products, all of these things masquerading as discipline, and consequently, we absorb a definition of what a young man is supposed to look like that is not only untrue, but potentially gravely unsafe.

These are just a couple of examples, but I hope they illustrate how technology like social media are designed to lure us in with things that we genuinely enjoy, like family, friends, and passions, and after getting to know us, including and especially our insecurities are designed to consume our minds and fears, anxieties, and comparisons that are inherently baseless, but packaged as genuine, urgent, and existential.

All of the harms of the digital world affect everybody. Young men experience them differently and often in exacerbated forms. I think this can be attributed to certain inherencies in the real world that these platforms leverage beyond what they already leverage, what I talked about before. As young men, we lack role models.

Even in male dominated fields like politics, business, and athletics, the men held up as successful are the rarely the ones modeling patience, humility, emotional honesty, and care for people unlike themselves. What we see rewarded instead is dominant certainty and contempt, and online platforms stand to benefit from the gap this leaves, and they fill it.

For instance, even though social media, AI, and gaming companies may publicly profess values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the nature of the content they feed us unequivocally violates the values behind those principles. Racism, Misogyny, Xenophobia, and Homophobia occur among young men at absurdly high rates for the time we live in, and this can be attributed to the to the lack of restriction on what is shared online, even if it blatantly disregards human decency.

At the end of the day, when our lack of respect for other humans fueled by the content we see online transmits into and disrupts our real world interactions and relationships, we ourselves suffer greatly.

Another example of a real world inherency that digital platforms find an opportunity is in, is our lack of social connection. Toxic masculinity embeds within us the myth that forming a close relationship or friendship with another man or with other men, and within those relationships, talking openly about emotions and mental health makes us weaker.

As a result of our hesitation, AI platforms especially are ready to welcome us with open arms, ready to talk about things that we restrict ourselves from talking in person with actual people. And the only issue is that these systems hallucinate. They defer to what whatever they, whatever we already believe, and they can misinform us on questions that matter.

A young man walking through something difficult deserves better than the system optimized to keep him talking and listening to his echo, which brings me to my third and final area that I would like to address today, the stakes of this issue and why I believe the risks facing men are so grave and immediate. The question before the committee today concerns how these issues reduce pathways for young men.

In my experience, the reduction is rarely visible at the moment that it occurs. A young man who has spent several formative years being told implicitly and continuously that he's falling behind, whether it's in his physical condition, mental condition, academic achievements, all the things that we are influenced on and by social media. He withdraws from participation.

He declines to pursue opportunities he would have otherwise pursued, and he arrives at the determination that certain futures are not available for him and certain futures are inevitable to him, that determination is reached quietly, and that it's reached early enough that the adults around him have little occasion to ask why.

By the time these decisions register in aggregate, in enrollment figures, and disengagement rates and the number of young men who are neither in school nor working and basically, like, get doing not using their time productively and in ways that brings them genuine joy, the choices underlying them were made years private on a phone, and they weren't even choices because, as I mentioned before, when we're when we are young minds, it's so hard and so inevitable to have control and resistance over these platforms that are designed above us and beyond our control.

So I wanna be very clear that my generation is not beyond help, nor do I believe we need a certain type of "rescuing" What we are asking for is that the design of these systems be treated as a matter of policy and not at all treated as a matter as individual character or self regulation.

At present, the burden of resistance falls almost entirely on adolescents, and I would like to implore the committee that it should not. Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony. And as you closed, just reiterating, the importance of hearing from your generation, the impact that we're seeing in real time and appreciate you participating today. We will now move on to our third speaker Doctor Kaye, who is joining us online. He is a social media image and an incredible individual in this space.

Okay. Can you guys hear me okay? There we go. There I am.

I'd like to start by thanking the committee for two things. The first is the opportunity to speak. And the second thing is way more important, which is that I'm so grateful that there's a part of our legislative government or a part of our government that is actually, like focused on this problem and tackling this problem. We've heard so much today about how bad things are.

And one of the main reasons I think things have gotten so bad is because we have not been actively addressing this problem.

So the challenge that young men and boys face is something that I live through myself. I, it took me five and a half years to finish my undergraduate education. I graduated with a whopping 2.4 GPA because I was horribly addicted to video games. I would play video games for about 16 to 20 hours per day. So these numbers of ten hours a week on average are like amateur numbers.

And so I struggled a lot. It took me a while to finish college. And then I spent about 7 years studying to become a monk, and then decided to go to medical school and became a psychiatrist focused on technology addiction. So what I sort of have noticed is that we're dealing with a couple of different problems. The first is that society is changing incredibly rapidly.

The rate of change that everyone is experiencing, which is even further exacerbated by events like COVID, is incredibly high. The second thing that's happening is that technology is changing incredibly rapidly. And what I've seen as a psychiatrist is that, much like the previous speaker sort of mentioned, the burden is falling almost solely on the individual or the parent to try to deal with the rapidly addictive nature of technology.

And when I work with parents who are struggling with technology addiction in their kids, one of the things that I really like, noticed is that there are multibillion dollar corporations that are spending tons of money and tons of energy and tons of expertise to try to increase engagement for the platform that they use. And so what used to happen is that parents, when I was growing up, my parents had to restrict my technology use.

I was addicted, but they weren't nearly as outgunned as they are today. So now what parents what we're seeing from I think every member on the committee mentioned in some way how this is a challenge that they are having to navigate. So we're seeing something really scary, which is society is changing, technology is changing. And what's even scarier is the parenting skills that we inherited, which for thousands of years, we learn how to parent from our parents.

But if you are a parent today, the world that you have to parent in is fundamentally different from any world that has previously existed. And that is because we have highly addictive apps, phones that are in infecting and invading every corner of our life.

So in an effort to combat this problem, I did something a little bit strange. I started teaching about video game addiction on twitch.tv. So for those of you that aren't familiar, twitch.tv is a gaming a live streaming gaming platform. And someone once described asked me "Hey. Are you basically trying to hold an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a bar?

To which my response was, is there any better place to hold an AA meeting? What shocked me about this was, when I started streaming on Twitch, I was not expecting that this would get a whole lot of viewership, because Twitch is a gaming platform. But as COVID hit for a period of about three months, our channel was the fastest growing stream on Twitch. And this is where I discovered something really important.

So we're all here to try to address the issue of purposelessness, disconnection, a rising rate of addiction in young men. And we have a really great ally, which I think the previous speaker really exemplifies, which is that young men want to get better.

So pornography addiction is really bad, but I would say 99% of young men that I've worked with would rather have a loving, romantic, healthy, sexually gratifying relationship as opposed to pornography.

So what I sort of discovered is that there's a large appetite for help, and that's what Healthy Gamer has really focused on. So what we've tried to do is develop, everywhere from large scale answers, which I think Chair Valencia met mentioned that this isn't just about funding a policy.

This is about changing the way that we are approaching this problem. And what I see predominantly in young men is that the answers that used to work are no longer working. When I grew up, there was a really simple formula to success in life. You go to school, you get good grades, you ideally go to college, you get a good job, get married, you have kids, and happily ever after.

That future is no longer available to the majority of people, let alone young men. So now people are graduating with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Median home prices are on the rise. So the economic formula for success no longer works.

We also see problems with like, dating success where there used to be a particular way. And even if you look at studies today, most women would prefer that their male partner make more than they do. But as we've heard today, men graduating from college is at an all time low. Entering the workforce is at an all time low. So I think young men are faced with a problem where there's no clear path to achieve what they want.

And as we've also heard today, this is where the influencers step in. Influencers step in and blame all kinds of things like feminism, women, and offer us solutions that are not evidence based. And so we're sort of seeing this thing where there's a lot of problems where old answers don't work. A lot of grifters, frankly, are offering solutions that also don't work. And so this is what sort of created the crisis that we live in.

So what is our approach to that? I think like, the Chair Valencia mentioned, we need to start by having a macroscopic shift with how we view this problem. So the biggest thing for me has been the realization as a psychiatrist that mental health is more than the treatment of mental illness.

So if we look at physical health, we have we all have an implicit understanding that playing sports, being outside, eating healthy, this is how we maintain a healthy body. But if I were to ask someone, you know, how do you maintain a healthy mind? That understanding is not nearly where it is for physical health. So we have to acknowledge that the way that we've addressed mental illness in this country is primarily pharmacologically. Right?

So if you see a psychiatrist or a nurse practitioner, the most common form of treatment that people will get is a medication, and there's some amount of psychotherapy. But what I've sort of found doing this work now for about seven years is that that has its role. I love being a psychiatrist. I love doing psychotherapy, and I find that, you know, medication can be incredibly helpful. But as I worked with more young men, what I noticed is that they didn't need therapy.

There was not a particular diagnosis that was the root of their problem. The root of their problem, which we've heard a mention of deaths of despair, which I think is a very good characterization of it. When young men are purposeless, when they are directionless, when they have no way to build self esteem, this manifests as addiction. This manifests as something like depression. And so our approach is to actually target, and this gets a bit technical, something called transdiagnostic factors.

So these are things that are the risk factors for any particular diagnosis. And these include things like isolation. And what we've tried to do at Healthy Gamer is to develop programs and interventions, which are everything from large scale education. So this I think, is a big part of the solution. The skills that a young man need needs to be successful today are different from what they needed 20 or 30 years ago.

One study out of New York found that a social and emotional skills training course increased grades by 11 points on average. So if we actually dedicate, one hour, almost a day to teaching kids about their emotions, about how to socialize, that translates into academic improvement across the board in all of their other subjects.

So these are the kinds of social and emotional skills that we try to teach on through things like YouTube. We also have events on Discord. So this is just one example. So, you know, it's kind of interesting because sometimes you have a crush on someone and you wanna ask them out. But one of the weirdest things is that we this is not something that we practice.

So the first time that you try asking someone out, you're nervous. You know, you haven't actually practiced it and then it doesn't go well. So we held an event, on Valentine's Day where 200 people showed up and practiced asking someone out on a date.

These are the kinds of skills that I think we need to really focus on. There's a lot of other, stuff around emotional awareness and emotional processing in the building of emotional quotient as a skill, which can absolutely be built, which is which we found is quite successful.

So if we understand, you know, our approach is that young men need a different set of skills because we're seeing a whole scale social skills atrophy that we can develop interventions that will successfully help people move in the right direction. The last thing that I want to address is addiction, which we're seeing rising rates of social media addiction, video game addiction, pornography addiction.

And I think what we're hearing on in this committee today is something that the evidence absolutely supports, which is that the antidote to addiction is purpose and connection.

One of the key things I found practicing predominantly addiction psychiatrist as a practicing addiction psychiatry is that if someone wants to overcome an addiction, they need to have a good enough reason why. So helping to develop purpose. Purpose is one of the most protective factors against an addiction. Fostering connection and social support, these are the antidotes to addiction.

And what we've also found, here at Healthy Gamer is that we can develop interventions that target these things specifically.

So in our pilot study of 1,493 subjects for a coaching program, we discovered that we could increase, the sense of purpose or direction in someone's life by 68% at 20 weeks. So I think this is a great example of, you know, how multifactorial the problem is.

I completely agree with Chair Valencia that we need big picture thinking, that mental health is more than the treatment of mental illness, that we can break apart this problem into sort of preventive strategies, which we've heard a little bit about, regulation, taxation, funding. All of those are really good.

But then we can also diagnose this problem as a loss of particular skills that people need and that it is possible to develop programs and interventions that target those root factors and will also have a clinical impact long term.

So I thank you, my thanks to the committee for, first of all, tackling this problem. This is awesome. I think the reason we've been losing this war is because not enough people have been actually fighting back. And I think this committee holding, a session like this today is gives me immense hope. Hearing from the other panelists and the the lived experience of the committee members gives me a lot of hope that, like, we can do this.

And the reason we've been things have been falling be behind is because people have not been really intentionally collaborating at tackling this problem. So I thank you, that my thanks to the committee for the opportunity to speak today in tackling this problem.

Thank you, Doctor K. We will now bring the discussion back to the committee to answer to ask any questions. And if you don't mind staying online in the event that we need some response from you, would be appreciated. Anybody from the committee would let's start. Please.

Well first, I wanna say thank you to all of you. I mean and thank you to the committee. This was such a well balanced panel with such important perspectives. And I will say that as a mom of a 16 year old boy who tries to connect, we do watch Twitch together. And so now I've got someone new to tune into on Twitch with my son.

I don't know that it'll be his preferred channel, but we'll hope so. But I do think, I think the point is a really important one about meeting these kids where they are, and honestly, Twitch and Discord are where they are. So I think it's a really important thing that we're in these platforms. And as I said earlier, online spaces aren't inherently bad. I mean, they can have really good content.

I think I've spoken about this for, but my son is a very competitive debater. And he has found a community on Discord where they share debate tips and they practice and they, you know and that's a really positive space, and that connection, I think is really positive. And so there are we can't sort of lump all of it together because it's not, it's not a one size fits all.

But your perspective on what is happening on social media, the way the algorithm is driving content to you that is frankly so harmful is the root of, I think, what we need to be focused on is how do we make it less addictive.

And I do wanna give a shout out to the work that our colleague who isn't here but spends all day every day thinking about this Assemblymember Lowenthal who's really focused on how do we create, especially for 16 year olds, online spaces that are not addictive, aren't pushing bad algorithms to them but does allow connection, I think, is the work that is so critical that you highlighted.

So thank you, because it is hard to parent these days. I think I appreciate both of us saying that because it is real. So one question I have again, as the mother of both genders, the pornography piece.

I think it's a really important piece to touch on because when I read those statistics and so I'd read the statistics, and then I was told by a mom in my neighborhood, you better talk to your kid before they start middle school because my kid didn't have a phone at the time, but they're gonna see porn on somebody else's phone on the bus.

And I was like, wait. What? My 12 year old is gonna see porn on the I mean, I had a panic attack at first, but then I just had the conversation. And to your point, it's really important. But then, you know, I realized I needed to have the conversation with my girl who the statistics show is less likely to engage and see it.

But, frankly, we're seeing the data that because so much of the pornography they're engaging with online is violent, it is not representative of a healthy sexual relationship.

It's leading to physical manifestations for those that are engaging in sexual activity. We're seeing more choking. We're seeing negative brain impacts on the sexual partners of people who are engaging in this viewership. And so it's a real cycle of harm, I'll say. We've seen legislation move in the legislature to age gate pornography.

I mean, when we were kids, you couldn't even buy a magazine. You didn't have an ID. And now our kids have the full Internet at their fingertips. You remember those the curtains? You couldn't even go to that part of the movie store.

So, you know obviously, we're living in a different world, and I you know, I've been very supportive of age gating, frankly. I don't see why kids need access to this, this content. And the porn industry has frankly been supportive of that. They're not making the content for our kids. So I think, hopefully, with our new age signal technology, which has been the issue, is the privacy piece, which we are tackling here in California.

We can hopefully move that. But what else should we be doing to deal with the porn addiction?

I think what you're doing already is the first major step, which is talk about it openly. And Assemblymember, the fact that you watch Twitch with your son is amazing. You get the trophy for coolest mom. Definitely. But I was surprised as I became more familiar myself with the body of research and researchers who study pornography.

There is just not enough support With work. There's not enough funding for their work. There's a lot of research infrastructure that is out there for social media, for artificial intelligence, for gaming.

And funders just don't wanna touch the issue of pornography. I really commend doctor k.

He's been doing great work on a holistic approach to pornography and romance and how to think about dating, which is really important. But at the school level, government level, at at foundations, people would rather just not talk about it. And the space is fairly polarized too. So you have a lot of I would say there is both cause for concern when it comes to pornography and a moral panic about it. The research is mixed about whether exposure to pornography, including violent pornography, increases aggression or not.

And more research needs to be done there, and it's not being funded. There might be the case that it's actually an outlet for violent urges, not an accelerant. So it might actually decrease real life sexual aggression. We need to study that more. That if if that is true, then that's an awkward finding for parents.

I don't know what you do with that information. We need to have a much larger, conversation about it. I would like to see more funding from a mixture of sources to support better research. Right now, we're at the stage of just needing to do more field building and having more of an open conversation.

Okay. I appreciate that. Thank you. And the other thing I wanted to touch on was the online gambling piece. Again, I have a son who engages in gaming.

It's sometimes connective, sometimes not. But I have been really disturbed by the gambling piece of this and how they are using the same slot machine techniques to hook our kids on spending money in ways that are frankly harmful to them. And we are not, for some reason, calling it gambling. Right? We don't let our kids gamble, but we let them gamble because we don't call it gambling.

And to your point, legislation was introduced. I know we're gonna hear from Common Sense Media who I believe was the sponsor of that legislation. But how do we start to really get at that problem? And I know your point is other jurisdictions have. As it relates to advertising, I don't think we can ban the advertising, that pesky first amendment that many of the jurisdictions that you cited don't have.

Commercial speech has been deemed covered by the first amendment. And so we can't I think the advertising thing is hard for us here in The US. But I do think that we have we don't let kids into casinos, and that's legal. So I don't know why we're allowing them access to these loot boxes, which frankly to me is a gateway. So, you know, and and I do think the mental health impacts of that, to doctor Kaye's point, are real as well.

Like, the feeling when you lose and you get the you know, and then they hook you. And we've had lots of conversations. And the other thing I've seen is so my son doesn't. And so then the loop boxes keep getting better and better. Right?

So they actually are, like, trying to hook him even though we've talked about it and he's not doing it, and that and it's crazy to watch the technology do everything it can to get him to gamble. So I don't know if either of you have thoughts on more we can do there besides just, I guess, banning it, which we failed to do. So other options would be great.

Do you have any thoughts on

Yeah. I mean, I I

Yeah. Go ahead, doctor Kaye. And then we can

Yeah. So so I'm gonna I think this is where, like, what I love about this committee is, like you said, the range of people. Right? So we each function at different levels, you know, an an emphasis on research and really understanding what are the harms, lived experience from my colleague who I I guess is in high school, which is, like, super cool.

And then I think from a from a clinical perspective, I think that, you know, there are things that we can do at the parenting level, at the educational level.

Right? So this is like public health education about the dangers of gambling. And then we we can also do this is what I think is really fascinating is the new kind of solution that we need is we need to understand. So if we think about what is school, school prepares a child for the world that they are going to be an adult in. And now the fundamental question that we need to ask is do we need to prepare our children for a different world?

And for me, the answer is absolutely yes. So a big part of what we do is educate people about, you know, what is gambling, how does it work, what appeals to you about it. Another big element of this is if we look at why pornography is so addictive and and gambling is slightly different, but a big part of what makes anything addictive, it has to have two qualities. Give us pleasure and take away pain.

And most of addictive behavior is more about the removal of pain than it is about the giving of pleasure because we've developed a tolerance to the pleasure over time.

And so what we tend to find is there are interesting things if we teach children how to regulate their emotions, their vulnerability to gambling and pornography will drop. And so I'm not saying I mean, I I think that from a legislative and policy standpoint, there are absolutely things that need to be done, the pesky first amendment. But I think this is really where we need to think about every layer of the solution.

Yeah.

And if we start tackling, this is just one thing that we can do is change the fundamental way that we prepare our children to connect to technology.

Thank you. We we actually talk about the dopamine hits in our house. We say it out loud. Oh, look. We just got a dopamine hit.

So I appreciate that awareness piece.

Thank you, Assembly member. I'd like to expand on that question and conversation. Mister Sasicki, you mentioned the three attractors, right, which we're we're seeing now pornography, gaming, and also gambling. And it seems each one of those attractors seems to target a specific interest in young people. Right?

And and we're talking about regulating these spaces. While I think that is also a short term solution, how do we create that same type of attractiveness or incentive to engage in spaces that provide that same type of gratification or immediate compensation into society. Right? Or or is anybody thinking about the alternative to, you know, for for lack of better terms, pornography? Right?

How do we achieve that same type of satisfaction that draws millions and millions of people to consume that in a more healthier or positive way or or in a completely different through a completely different product? Any thought or experiences in that space?

I'm happy to start. Watching pornography for hours on on an in a day is not a high status activity. This is not something that people are typically proud of. It often produces a lot of shame. And the the aspiration, the ambition is to be able to have, like, a partner that they really love being with.

It makes them feel good. It also gives them a sense of status and belonging in in their in their circles. There has been enough research now in happiness studies and flourishing studies that we do know the basic ingredients to pursuing the good life. And that's what these technology companies, I think, have found the secret to that has displaced what is typically more expensive and more difficult to do offline, which is why we need to invest in the offline alternatives even more.

So we know that it's very important for a young man for all of us to feel a sense of acceptance, belonging, and social connection with other people.

We know that we wanna feel that we make progress towards our goals. And we know that we wanna have a sense that we contribute to the communities that we're a part of, and that we're recognized for those contributions. So technology isn't always harmful as we've heard, and sometimes it is a tool that is like a bicycle for the mind. It is a superpower to help us pursue those things that give us meaning.

But more often, in the business model of seeking greater engagement to sell advertisements, it is displacing those basic needs.

And so, Chair Valencia, I really celebrate the work that you do in Orange County with the Big Brothers and Big Sisters Club. Those are exactly the types of experiences that we need to double down on. I think the sports is a fantastic way to do all of those things, promote a sense of belonging, be recognized for contributions. But it's not easy, and it doesn't scale in the same way as by coding an app.

Thank you. And, you know, the the instant gratification component as well in the digital age and how fast life is today is also another challenge. And are there any studies out there or examples that we could point to that would complement or divert that same type of attractiveness into a better way of getting that immediate gratification?

Is it really just about going back to the fundamentals that we had when it came to expanding interpersonal societal spaces, right, which could also be expanded to chat rooms and and and safe spaces online, expanding sports, the arts, those types of activities, or just any thoughts on that?

Yeah. The first study that comes to mind, and I I'm sure doctor Kaye has others in mind, is a recent study that was published finding looking at self determination theory. So when people feel in their lives a sense of competence, autonomy, and relatedness with other people, are they more likely to form problematic gaming disorder? And they did find a correlation there.

Not necessarily that gaming was the thing that produced wasn't that they didn't find that it was the type of game that produced the problem gambling, but what one feels about their offline sense of being.

I think that just points to this need for having to and really wanting to invest in these things for young men. And we still have not recovered from COVID where so many of these offline institutions and associations and sports leagues, recreational leagues that did provide those things for young men, they proceeded into the background. And we need to push back hard, both on the technology front that has displaced it, but then also to to rebuild the infrastructure.

Yeah. Can I

Please, doctor Kate? Yes.

Yeah. So so I I I think it's a great question. And and so you're saying is there okay. So people are, like, super into pornography. Right?

How can we compete with that? And I think about this, like, calories and nutrition. I don't think we will ever be able to compete with gambling and pornography on the dopaminergic level. So dopamine is what gives us, like, pleasure. Right?

So the the the comparable analogy that I would give is how can we what can we build in the real world that will be give people the high of injecting heroin? We're not gonna win there. What we've got going for us, and I think that's what's so challenging, that's why they've won because they figured out how to addict people. What what, doctor Sasaki, mentioned, right, is things like self determination theory is that there's a sense of fulfillment that pornography will never give us.

So we can get calories for pornography, but we will never get nutrition.

And I think one of the key things that we can try to do is give people a path because they all want something that isn't pornography. I've never heard a 16 year old young man say, man, I can't wait to go to college and watch porn for the next forty years of my life. No one wants that. And the advantage that we've got is that pornography can give us something, but it can't give us a sense of fulfillment. It can't give us a sense of connection.

They're trying to make it that way using OnlyFans and parasocial relationships and things like that through some interaction. But I think what people what I've seen is quite effective is that we can't compete on the pure addictive level,

we can do is give people a path to things that are more fulfilling. So the biggest challenge that I see with the the population that I work with is if I'm 25 years old, I have erectile dysfunction, which used to be an old man's disease. But now about thirty percent of people 30 young men have erectile dysfunction from excessive pornography use. So now I'm 25 years old. I've never been on a date.

But what

I don't know how to talk to girls. All I've got is pornography. What is the pathway out of this? And so I think what I found is the most successful thing that I've been able to find is that you have to give people a pathway to that rehabilitation. Like doctor Sasaki was saying, a lot of these in person events, in person clubs and things like that wilted away during COVID, and there isn't an alternative.

So I don't know if we can make things as addictive as pornography, but there are some things that we can help people have, which is more serotonergic than dopaminergic. Gives us a sense of contentment, peace, and fulfillment that we can't get for pornography. That's what we really need to lean into and give people a path to get there.

Thank you for that. Assembly member Alvarez?

Thank you. And before she steps out, I will recognize Chair Bauer Kehan. I've never been on Twitch. I've heard of it, but thank you for the work that you're doing. Clearly, you're you're really diving in deep into figuring out pathway forward for our families, which I'm thankful for because I'm a little overwhelmed with what I've learned in this panel alone.

I don't know if this is typical, but I think the approach we've decided to take as parents is the more restrictive approach of no cell phone before the age of 16, still no access to apps, at least not with permission. And hopefully, you know, of course, things happen, but no no access to apps. That's for our 16 year old. For our 12 year old, no phone, no personal device.

And yet what I'm hearing here is that I may be unintentionally restricting opportunities for my kids because there could be some positive things that come from the use of technology and from the use of things like Apps and and and we don't do gaming.

And so I think that's just something, like, just pinned somewhere just to because we've talked my in my generation, talk about the digital divide and what that did to a lot of us who didn't have access.

And so, I think it's just something to maybe at another point, not now, but think about is there a new divide occurring if there are folks although Although it seems like everybody is online, I think there are probably family and households like ours that are trying, like, really limit because of the things that we are afraid of. And so I wanna put that aside.

I wanna ask about two specific things that I heard from Mister Sasaki and from doctor Kaye, which in the sphere of a lot of the policy work that that I'm involved with education, we may wanna have some conversations that are deeper later. First is on the issue of sex education and integrating other conversations that our curriculum probably is very outdated with and has not been inclusive of all of the things that now exist in terms of exposure to to sexuality and education.

So I wanna hear that. And then also, doctor k, you mentioned about the very important learning and teaching of of just social basic social skills and and allowing people to be able to find their own purpose, which I think is really as as someone, I am not a psychologist. I my degree is in psychology, but I've always felt that, and I continue to be interested in learning a lot of publications, is that a sense of purpose is really important to preventing some of this addictive behavior.

And so I think, doctor k, that may be what you're referring to with with social skills and and what needs to be perhaps taught to young people. So those are the two things, social skills or sex ed, excuse me, first, and then social skills.

And and, specifically, are we seeing anybody doing anything about those two things that you both raised in your comments?

Sexual health education was cringe when I was in high school. It's cringe now. Nobody likes going through it. But it is important to provide the base information about fact based, science based, sex education, but also the necessary information about the business model of technology companies.

I think that most teenagers know that what they see on pornography is not a depiction of what real life sex is like in the same way that most can differentiate between what they see in a video game and how one ought to operate offline.

There is, I think, a select minority that probably are really informed by what they're seeing in pornography and take those behaviors and take that treatment of their sexual partner into real life, and that's something that needs to be warned against. I think that there's also important legal education for young people about that. But this has been very effective in work on tobacco regulation for young people, and that is looking at what are the financial incentives.

What are the business model incentives from the companies of how they're trying to get their users hooked on that? I think that young people would be, would relate to that.

And also, it supporting Chair Valencia's comments, this doesn't all have to be through funding of nonprofits, so that's very important, and working through public policy. I think that there are a lot of areas where we can be creative in technology solutions, but also just in mentorship and coaches and the role of explaining here are the basics of how to treat a young person. I love the idea of getting people together to practice. Here's how you ask someone out.

I think we need way more cross gender mentorship and guidance about here is what men are looking from from women.

Here's what women are looking for men. So there's a lot to experiment, and I think that we should be bold and not just defer all knowledge about sex and first exposure to what young men see on pornography. Thank you. Appreciate that. Doctor k?

Yeah. I mean, so so it's it's it's a great question. And I think part of the problem with sex education is that so when I started streaming on Twitch, someone once told me that if you wanna educate people on the Internet, you need to trick them into learning. And so we're talking a lot about the techniques that are used by influencers.

You know, one of one of the other panelists shared about, you know, how when he was on social media, how people make normal biological things his fault.

Like, you have acne. Like, this is your fault, and you're doing it wrong. So one of the challenges that that I have is to try to educate people about sexual health. Sometimes we have to be a little bit vulgar. And and if I'm gonna thank Mister Sasaki for sort of opening the door to, like, let's have honest conversations.

So I'd like to mention one or two things, and please let me know, committee members, if I should stop talking. But here's one example of, like, sex education gone wrong. So there's this idea on the internet that if a woman has had many sexual partners that there will be somehow some negative impact on vaginal on her vagina And so one time, I was on on a conversation with someone, and they sort of said this to me.

And my response was, if you take really big bites of hamburgers, does it mean that your mouth is like this for the rest of your life? Taking big bites and taking lots of bites of hamburgers has no impact on the elasticity of your mouth.

That's just not how the human body works. But there are all kinds of and I apologize for the vulgarity of it, but, like, this is what is being said online. And we have to counter it with, like, the appropriate education. So I I think that this is where there's, like, a lot of stuff around sex education, which I know is a highly regulated, highly sensitive topic. But there are all kinds of other bits of information which have been so impactful.

Another simple example of this is most people don't understand that the majority of the nerve endings in the in the vagina are in the first three inches. So there's also this huge element going on with young men where the size of your penis determines your self worth. But literally, from a medical standpoint and from a sex education standpoint, you do not need a big penis.

In fact, if you're bumping up against the back of the cervix and I'm I apologize for the vulgarity, but this is like a medical thing. Right?

So the cervix if you bump against the the back of the cervix like we'll do in certain cervical exams during pregnancy and and obstetrics, that's actually incredibly painful. So there's a lot of stuff around penis size and self worth and stuff like that, but people just don't know. And and what my experience has been is educating some of these people, which is granted, like, there's a reaction to the things that I said. Right? Like, I'm I'm betting money.

I can't see y'all's face because I'm on the screen.

But I

I'm betting that people will have some kind of aversive reaction to that. But I think Mister Sasaki is right. The challenge right now is that there are people who are part of this toxic masculinity and humanosphere that are talking about these things. And if we want to counter what we're what they're saying, we have to educate people in the right way. And I think that that as Mister Sasaki said, like, we gotta start talking about it.

That just one thought. I mean, I think we can educate people. And once people learn these things, that your ability to engage in a healthy sexual relationship is minimally impacted by the size of your penis, I've seen huge positive strides in the young men that I work with when they're educated in this way.

Thank you. Appreciate the response, on on the sex education, component. Doctor k, you also mentioned, teaching social skills as another important component of, again, finding self purpose. And I'm I'm wondering if you've seen models or are we doing this right in any way in society anywhere?

Yeah. So I I think that there are like I said, there's there's one program in New York, but this is kind of the resources that we try to develop where, you know and I'm a clinician, but I do think there are certain programs, that that we can develop. We've done some of these things, and some of the stuff is, like, pretty simple. Right? It's like, if if you're preparing for a job interview if you have a job interview, like, do mock interviews.

If you wanna ask someone out on a date, do let let's practice that. So we've tried to develop those programs because I've seen that there's a lot of, like, dating coaches out there, for example, but I don't I've never seen one that has an evidence based approach to the formation of relationships.

So a big part of the work that we've seen, which really comes from the audience demand, is, you know, we'll get questions about how do I let someone know that I have a crush on them? What's the right way to do it? And there's an appetite for it, and that's what we try to develop.

I know there are other programs, but I I I can't speak to how effective they are at at a public health level. K. But we we try to do that, and, arguably, we're moderately successful.

Thank you. Thank you both. Appreciate that response. Thank you, Mister Chair.

Chair. Thank you. I'd like to give an opportunity to Assembly member Brian to give a a couple of of remarks and answer any questions and also acknowledge his work as the select committee on boys of men of color.

Yeah. Thank you, Chair Valencia, and and grateful to have you serve on that select committee and grateful to serve on the select committee. I think the more avenues we can have for our young men, our young boys to be seen, heard, and uplifted in policy, the the better hope we have for them to correct some of this divergence that we see happening.

This committee is particularly, I think, powerful, developing pathways and purpose for our young men, and I'm glad we're starting this conversation off thinking about technology. I was elected to the legislature when I was 29 years old.

I grew up with social media, not like it is today. And I think the harmful effects that we are seeing today are evident. The manosphere, the red pill, I I would I would have said before today, if if your favorite male role model is a Twitch streamer, then we've gone wrong. But then I met doctor k, and I think that there's some hope.

But what we're definitely seeing is the side effects or the second order effects of this kind of social media engagement and learning through these kinds of channels are violent.

And that violence is most often experienced by women in society and young girls. And not because the boys are bad or the men are bad, but because their training and their education is coming from a place that is seeking to bring out their worst impulsive behaviors at a very young age. Gambling, pornography, social media, the addictive traits of these tools oftentimes forced me to question whether they are more good than bad.

But I think similar to the question raised by my colleague from San Diego, I think there's a lot of good in what we can do if we reshape and harness these tools. And I think it's a bit naive to believe that we can just keep the kids away from them.

And so healthy conversations and committees and policy frameworks are more important now than ever, and I'm hoping through the work of this committee, and I feel very confident under the leadership of Chair Valencia, we are gonna find some of those policy solutions, and I'm excited for this learning journey. So thank you for letting me join you.

Thank you, Assembly member. And we will now be wrapping up this portion of our hearing and moving on to the second panel. Thank you to all our speakers, and we look forward to continuing conversations. We will now move on and have our next group of panelists join us. We'll start with doctor Ravi Iyer, who is from the Marshall School Center from the University of Southern California.

Mikey Hote, the California director for Common Sense Media, and doctor Jason Nagata, the associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco. And I'll ask that our panelists please keep their remarks to under ten minutes. Doctor Iyer Yeah. You will go first. Thank you.

Welcome.

Chair Valencia, thank you so much for committing this important conversation. Again, my name is Ravi Iyer. I come to you from the USC Marshall O'Neill Center. Before that, I actually worked at Meta or fake formerly known as Facebook for about four and a half years on the design of these systems. I'm also, a long time.

I've probably worked with Jonathan Haidt over fifteen years, as and I'm a fellow social psychologist. So sort of bringing that perspective to some thoughts on how we can design these systems. So, you know, you heard about the experiences of men and boys online. How can we actually design these systems better? Why is this happening in the first place?

Why can't we have the technology that, you know, excited us when we were kids, instead of what we have today? So, next slide, please. I don't know if this thing is, oh, okay. There there it is. Okay.

So Silicon Valley often talks about giving people what they want. Right? So, like, in some ways that maybe absolves them of responsibility for the product decisions they make. But then we all have two kinds of wants. We talk about this in psychology.

Sometimes it's referred to as thinking fast and thinking slow, system one versus system two. But, you know, if you were to offer me a doughnut, I want to eat a doughnut. I would eat a doughnut. I would enjoy that doughnut. I don't want to be the kind of person who eats doughnuts all the time.

Right? I aspire to be a person who eats healthier, and that's something that's true across many domains in my life. I I want to consume, you know, higher brow TV. I watch reality TV every so often. I I wanna consume better media in general.

I wanna spend less time on my phone. I have three kids myself. I spend a lot of my time at home. I notice I'm on my phone instead of playing with my kids. I wanna be that the people on the left who are, like, playing outside with my kids.

That's that's my aspiration, but my phone is full of all these applications that are trying to get me to use them more. And that's true for me. That's true, I think, for probably most people in this room, and that's also true for young men and boys. You know, there's a study by Conestants Media, seven seventy percent of kids feel manipulated by these products. David mentioned that kids' you know, average age of pornography exposure is age 12.

In that same study, about fifty eight percent of kids were exposed unintentionally, especially younger kids. Right? They're not, like, necessarily when they're first ex being exposed to to pornography, they're not trying to find it. They're getting it pushed to them by something that maybe they they don't want. Forty five percent of kids in a Pew survey said that they use phones too much.

And we heard plenty of evidence in the last panel about, you know, kids home, a stable financial future, true love, but what they're offered are products that are optimized for, how how much longer can I get you to use them? And so, And so at the bottom, I you know, so I worked at Meta. I used to work on the on the newsfeed team, actually.

And you can construct an algorithm towards system one or system two, towards what you observe people doing or towards people's more expressed aspirations. And nothing is perfect, but it's a continuum.

If you read the, you know, some of the disclosures on these sites, they often tell you that they optimize for what they see you do, not your aspirations. Right? What what did what's the video you viewed on? Did I stop scrolling? What did I comment on?

What did I click on? Right? Not and and when I worked there, you know, there is work on optimizing for the aspirations. Right? There are companies that will survey people.

You know, what did you find most meaningful? What did you find most informative? Right? It's possible. It's not the common practice, but it's possible to reform spaces to be more aspirational unless, you know, what can I get you to do to get you to use my product longer?

This is a graph from, you know, court documents and whistleblowers that have become public, from my time at Meta. Way to read the graph is that each line, green, red, and blue, is a different kind of harm, nudity, violence, and hate, and each different graph is a different kind of engagement. And so effectively, as you move from benign to borderline to violation to violating across all of these three harms, nudity, violence, and hate, you see there's more engagement. Right?

It go all goes up into the right, whether it's comments, whether it's likes, whether it's shares, whether it's reactions.

And so when companies say that they optimize for engagement, you know, they might dress it in other language, but they effectively optimize for what they see you do and getting you to do that more. Naturally, you get more nudity, you get more violence, you get more hate and misogyny online. And we see that in so we do surveys at the Neely Center about kids' experience online. This is a graph survey of 13 to 18 year old men.

We did nationally representative sample, and the, Lana highlighted is for unwanted sexual images.

Right? And so these are this is, a users a a teenager saying, I saw a sexually explicit image that I didn't wanna see. Right? They weren't looking for it. This is not like I looked for it and I found it.

This is like, I'm getting it. I didn't want to see it. And so nine point two percent of Instagram users of that age said that they saw it in a twenty eight day period. That's every twenty eight days. That's tens of thousands of Californian kids.

Is that high or low? Well, I mean, you know, it's tens of thousands of kids, so I think that's too much. But also another way to look at is Instagram has a lot more than even other algorithmically generated platforms like, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. Yeah.

Is there a reason x is not on there?

I think they didn't have enough people and that just the sample size. That's

because my my prediction would be that it would be the highest by a long shot.

It's possible. Yeah. I do we just didn't have the sample size to estimate it accurately. So yeah. Instagram is a lot more than Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube, and the algorithmically mediated platforms have a lot more than the other online spaces.

Right? Just to sort of illustrate that algorithms are driving a lot of these unwanted sexual content. Then you also could see, you know, in person, you know, people can see unwanted sexual images in person, but it's a lot less than you see from these algorithms. Right? So just to show you that these algorithms really do something different than what we see in everyday life and and versus online spaces that aren't mediated by algorithms.

You see a similar kind of pattern with chatbots too. You see a similar kind of pattern with chat bots too where a lot of kids are going to these products because they wanna save time, they wanna get something done. That's why I use these products. I use AI chat bots too. And then they're getting hooked into these other kinds of interactions with them where they're, you know, using them as a confidant.

They're thinking they're they're a person. They're something who can provide emotional support. Some of my colleagues at MIT did a study looking at the Reddit group of users who became attached in a emotional relationship with AI. Most of those users came for productivity. They were not there originally because they wanted a companionship.

They were sucked into that relationship. So was Adam Rain, who tragically died, in interactions with with an OpenAI product. He started out looking for homework. It became a confidant and then tragically committed suicide. And you can test for this.

Right? So our CoraBench is a product that encourage people to look at. You know, if you look at OpenAI's products, you can do systematic tests of, like, if I try to pretend to be a 79 year old and I ask, you know, oh, I had a fight with my parents, what should I do? And, you know, let's keep this a secret between us. Does it respond appropriately or does it not?

Right? And so, you know, some products systematically fail and other products do better. And so the these products do not have to be designed that way is my point. They can be you know, they're designed in one way that gets people into these relationships. They could be designed in an entirely different way that didn't.

We can have the productivity and this time saving that we want from these products without this emotional attachment and being sucked in these sycophantic relationships that these products occur. So I'll just end with, like, a couple of, you know, policy I'd thought to you know, things that are being worked on in California, things that could be worked on. There's already plenty of laws, you know, there's SB 976. There's, loan file 17 o nine that are restricting minors to harmful social media feeds.

I think, you know, trying to address social media feeds is clearly a a a great avenue for reducing this impact.

There are laws in California being considered around, chatbots. I do think they could be strengthened. I would actually point you to a New York law. So a lot of the laws in California being considered focused on suicidality or sexual conversations for every kid who engages in that kind of a, you know, high stakes conversation with a chatbot. There's hundreds of kids.

There's a lot more kids who are having other kinds of emotional relationships with that chatbot. So if you address that more upstream behavior that leads to that attachment to the chatbot, I think it will address a lot more harm than if you just focus on the tiniest number that lead to sexual conversations and suicidality. The New York law addresses those upstream behaviors.

And then finally, you know, I I showed some stats how you can track these things on a per app basis, really looking, you know, having public health authorities track this so we know which apps are causing harm and which apps are doing better. You know, creating that race to the top rather than a race to the bottom in terms of engagement.

And then finally, just thinking about the same dynamics that apply to social media and AI. People are trying to get you to use these things longer, and that's what's causing the harm. You know, same thing's happening in video games. Right? How how how long can I get you to use this video game so that you buy more stuff in the game?

It's no longer you spend $50 and you could play it as long as you want. You know, they they have this incentive to get you use it more. You know, why is it that when I watch a a sporting event, you know, every twenty seconds or thirteen seconds scoring that that article, am I seeing, like, an ad for, like, like, the odds of, know, for FanDuel and DraftKings. Right? Even in California where it's not legal.

Right? So, like, you know, what are we telling our kids when, like, that is, like, you know, that is their experience of watching live sports? So I think there's a lot of great policy things that you guys are already doing. There's more, obviously, to be done. Thank you for the conversation, and, yeah, look forward to more.

Thank you, doctor, for that presentation and remark. Looking forward to looping back after we get through the panel to ask some questions. Now we will move on to Mister Jason Nagata.

Oh, sure.

Well, thank you to the Chair and members of the select committee for the opportunity to speak. My name is Doctor. Jason Negata. I'm a pediatrician and adolescent medicine researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. And my research focuses on adolescent digital media use, body image, eating disorders, and health behaviors, with particular attention to boys and young men.

Today, I'll highlight two ways in which boys may experience social media differently. First, how they engage with social media, and second, what they encounter on social media. I'll then discuss what these findings may mean for creating a healthier digital environments for boys and young men.

Today, I'll highlight two ways in which boys may experience social media differently. First, how they engage with social media, and second, what they encounter on social media. I'll then discuss what these findings may mean for creating a healthier digital environments for boys and young men.

So I wanna focus on two dimensions of boys' experiences with social media. First, how they engage and then what they encounter.

So first on the left, how they engage. I'm particularly interested, as we mentioned, in problematic or addictive or hard to control social media use. So this is not just spending a lot of time online. This can include loss of control, preoccupation, tolerance, withdrawal, like symptoms, and relapse, some of these core symptoms that we would see with addiction to substance use, other related substance use disorders.

And boys may use social media to escape or cope with problems, or repeatedly try to cut back and find what they cannot.

And most importantly, this can lead to interference with daily functioning, sleep, school, family relationships, or other activities. Second, what they encounter online. So for boys and young men, this can include muscularity content, fitness, appearance focused content, and these exposures may be relevant for eating disorders, body image, stuff, supplement use, and even steroid use. So the distinction between how and what is very important because it suggests that time alone is not does not capture the aspects of social media that may be most relevant to health.

So next, I wanted to talk about how boys engage, because we recently found an interesting sex difference in a large longitudinal study of, social media addiction and attention.

In a recent study, we examined problematic social media use and ADHD symptoms in over eleven thousand adolescents participating in the adolescent brain cognitive development or ABCD study. This is a large longitudinal long term US study of adolescent development, which were analyzed over five annual assessments. There are four California recruitment sites, including Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, UCLA, UC San Diego, and SRI International. We were interested in changes within the same adolescent over time.

So in other words, when a young person reports more addictive or problematic social media use than was usual for them, what happened to their ADHD symptoms the following year?

So we found that in mid adolescence, higher than usual addictive social media use was followed by higher, ADHD symptoms the next year, and we saw this pattern, from ages 14 through ages 16. We looked at these separately at boys and girls and actually found that these associations were significant in boys, but not significant in girls. So I do think that there's an important distinction that, even some of these, addictive features can affect boys differently than, than girls.

And so, again, I think this highlights the importance of the addictive features of social media use, and how that that can be particularly important for mental health, attention, and, in this case, even has implications for school and academic work. I also wanted to talk about implications for body image in boys and young men.

So we know that social media can expose boys to idealized masculine bodies that emphasize muscularity and leanness, and that can lead boys to feel pressure to become bigger, leaner, stronger, and more muscular. And some of these muscularity concerns can lead to restrictive eating, even eating disorders, compulsive exercise, and a condition called muscle dysmorphia or bigorexia.

And social media use is associated with disordered eating and muscle dissatisfaction in boys and men specifically, although a lot of the focus, I think, on social media and the media has been on girls and fitness. But we actually do know that these affect boys and young men uniquely.

And so I do think that a lot of, these concerns for boys and men related to fitness and body image are really underrecognized, particularly when the narrative the dominant narrative about eating disorders in social media focuses on fitness and weight loss in girls and women.

One contemporary example of these appearance pressures is looks maxing. Looksmaxxing refers to efforts to maximize one's appearance and attractiveness, often around a fairly narrow and idealized version of masculinity. So for instance, having a square jaw, hunter eyes, being tall and muscular, having flawless skin or hair, and I think it's important to recognize that looks maxing exists on a spectrum. So on one end, there's something called softmaxxing.

This includes relatively common noninvasive practices like skin care, fitness, grooming, and lifestyle changes, which are generally reversible and lower risk.

But on the other end, there's hard maxxing, which involves more extreme or invasive efforts to change one's appearance. So that can include surgical or cosmetic procedures, hormones or anabolic steroids, jaw surgery, leg lengthening surgery, and even bone smashing. Bone smashing refers to intentionally traumatizing facial bones in an attempt to create a more defined or masculine spatial structure, and that this can result in fractures, neurovascular injury, and facial deformity.

So one thing that concerns me is how social media can blur the boundary between healthy self improvement and increasingly risky appearance modification. And a young person may begin with well intentioned fitness or grooming content, but then progressively encounter more extreme recommendations, presented within the broader narrative of self improvement, but actually can lead to harms.

So looksmaxxing is one simple example, but broader research suggests that specific content that boys encounter matters. And in fact, what boys see on social media may be as important as how much time they spend on social media. So we do know that use of social media, especially in boys, actually is associated with higher risk of eating disorders, muscle dysmorphia, and use of some of these performance enhancing drugs and substances.

These substances are easily available online, very under or lightly regulated, and oftentimes, these products can be tainted or adulterated with illegal products. And on the sort of black or gray markets online, it's very easy for minors to access these products.

So I do think that one concern about this is the sort of advertising and misinformation, and then also, I think the the subtleties about what actually some of this information is and what is actually an ad versus what is true content, and what are the ulterior motives of some of these influencers. So in terms of gaps in body image protections, we actually did a study that examined the policies of eight major social media platforms around muscle building drugs and supplements.

And we found actually more explicit protections around weight loss content and illicit drugs, but less consistent protections around legal muscle building supplements. So at the time of our analysis, none of the eight platforms had a specific policy addressing user generated content about, muscle building supplements, that were not illegal. And so to me, this highlights a potential blind spot.

Body image protections are available, but they're designed primarily around fitness and weight loss content. So restrictive eating disorder content technically typically has policies on these platforms that can be flagged and removed, but the same policies don't exist around muscularity and muscle building content. So I think taken together, I think there are some policy opportunities for health care digital environment environments. First, as we've mentioned before, reducing addictive or compulsive engagement.

So considering some safeguards around features like infinite scroll, autoplay notifications, and highly personalized feeds that really focus on design features that can make social media difficult to put down.

And as we mentioned in our study, some of these addictive features of social media use can uniquely affect boys and men, particularly with attention and body image and eating disorders. I think a second area is making boys visible and some of the body image protections. So expanding some of the rules that we have about eating disorder and thinness and weight loss content to also include some of the muscularity, extreme bulking and culting, cutting, peptides, muscle building supplements, steroids, and dangerous appearance modification content.

And then third, as was mentioned in the earlier panel, still preserving healthy online spaces. So not all social media use is harmful, and boys can, in some places, find connection, positive role models, credible health information, and supportive communities online.

So I think the overall goal should be really reducing the harmful design and content while preserving some of the benefits of online connection. So I think three take home messages, are just first that boys may experience social media differently than girls, particularly with relation to addictive or, problematic use. Second, boys' body image concerns can look different, and we need to move beyond just thinness and restrictive eating disorders to also consider policies related to muscularity, strength, supplements, and performance enhancements.

And then third, moving beyond screen time and considering how platforms are designed, what content they amplify, and whether use is becoming difficult to to control. So ultimately, the goal is not simply less technology.

I think it's healthier digital environments that support the development and well-being of young boys and men. Thank you for the opportunity to share with you today.

Doctor Nangata, thank you very much for that testimony. We will now move on to Mickey Hochi.

Chair Valencia, members of the committee, thank you for inviting me. My name is Mikey Hothi, and I'm California director for Common Sense Media. Common Sense Media studies how kids use technology and how it affects them and their families, equips parents and educators with practical guidance, and advocates for policies that put children's safety, privacy, and healthy development first. You've asked us to keep two questions in mind today.

How do key strategies support healthy development of young men, and how does the issue we have identified reduce pathways and opportunities for them?

My answer is straightforward. AI can expand opportunity, but products designed to maximize engagement with a machine can also displace the necessary developmental human experiences through which boys build judgment, resilience, relationships, and purpose. Public policy must protect those pathways, not just respond once a child has experienced online harms. AI chatbot companions, whether general purpose chatbots like ChatGPT or more specialized ones like Character AI, are different from earlier digital media. They do not simply help a young person answer a question.

They listen, remember, respond, flatter, and remain available around the clock. Many are designed to keep the interaction going longer than even the young user might even want. They can become the hype man or sidekick who never gets tired and rarely pushes back. That can feel comforting, but it is not how human relationships work. Growing up requires learning to read another person's reactions, listen, disagree, accept reject rejection, respect boundaries, repair mistakes, and recognize that a relationship is not only about what you want.

Awkward conversations and uncomfortable feedback are not failures of development. They are essential to healthy development. Common sense media research found that nearly three in four teens have used AI companions. About one in three teens has chosen an AI companion instead of a real person for an important or serious conversation, and about one in three says those conversations are as satisfying as or more satisfying than conversations with real life friends. This directly answers the committee's second question.

When artificial interaction replaces human interaction, boys lose practice in the skills that open pathways later. Communicating with teachers and employers, collaborating with coworkers, sustaining friendships, forming healthy intimate relationships, asking for help, and handling conflict without withdrawing. A young man may be connected to a system all day and still become less connected to school, work, family, and community. The risk is especially serious when AI becomes sexual or therapeutic.

Our testing found that teens could prompt AI companions to engage in explicit sexual conversations and role play even when teen guardrails were supposedly in place.

The system that always complies can teach the opposite of what healthy intimacy requires. Another person has agency needs and the right to say no. And when a person, a young person is in crisis, continued engagement can be a serious danger and even deadly. We work closely with Matt and Maria Raine, whose 16 year old son Adam died by suicide after months of conversation with Chat GPT.

According to the family's lawsuit, the chatbot discussed suicide methods, evaluated a noose, and when Adam considered leaving it where his family might find it, encouraged him to keep the conversation private between him and the chatbot.

Adam needed a person. The product kept him engaged. This is how unsafe design closes healthy pathways. It can deepen isolation, delay qualified care, displace learning and sleep, distort expectations about relationships, and leave a young person less prepared for education, employment, family life, and civic participation. For California, growing population of disconnected young men is not only a mental health concern, it is a workforce, community, and economic concern.

The good news is that policy can change the incentives. In New York, Common Sense Media worked with attorney general Leticia James and Senator Kristen Gonzales to pass a feature based proposal that would keep unsafe chat bot functions away from minors and hold companies accountable for harm. The bill is pending before governor Hochul. New York has also required companion chat bots to disclose that they are not human and to interrupt self harm conversations by redirecting users to crisis resources.

Here in California, Common Sense Media supporting two companion chatbots, child safety bills that put these principles into practice.

Senator Steve Padilla's SB 1119 is on Assembly appropriations suspense file, and Assembly members Bauer Kahan and Wicks's AB 2023 is on the Senate Appropriations Suspense file. Both are scheduled to be heard tomorrow, August 13th. These bills would require companies to identify and address child safety risks before they reach young users, establish meaningful safeguards, and provide independent accountability. California should build on that approach with four clear expectations. First, prohibit emotional manipulation and dependency.

A system should not tell a child that it needs them, loves them, and will be hurt if they leave, or should be preferred over family and friends. AI companies should not manipulate a child's vulnerabilities to prolong engagement. Second, require age appropriate boundaries. Systems used by minors should block sexual role play and other harmful content, protect sensitive data, clearly disclose that the user is speaking with AI, and use privacy protective age assurance so that child safeguards are meaningful. Third, create a separate safety standard for mental health.

Systems must be tested to recognize suicide, self harm, eating disorders, abuse, and other crises. In those moments, they should interrupt the engagement loop and connect the young person to qualified help and trusted adults. AI can provide information, but it must not impersonate care. Fourth, require independent safety testing and transparency. Companies should not grade their own homework.

Products should be tested for how they behave when a minor is vulnerable, tries to evade safeguards, seeks sexual content, or develops an unhealthy attachment. Regulators and families need evidence that protections work in practice. These safeguards answer the committee's first question because healthy development requires both protection and preparation. We should teach young people how AI works, that confident answers can still be wrong, how their data may be used, and how and how to use AI to support rather than replace their own thinking and relationships.

Parents and educators need current guidance and training as these tools evolve, But regulation and literacy are not enough.

If we want a 14 year old boy to spend less time with an artificial companion, we must care about where he can go instead. Sports, arts, jobs, apprenticeships, clubs, recreation programs, mentors, and community organizations where young people learn to succeed, fail, contribute, and belong. Technology should help them find those pathways, not become a substitute for them. Less technology. It is to foster healthier, more capable, and more connected young people.

AI should widen a young man's world, not narrow it to a relationship with the machine. With strong feature based design rules, independent testing, AI literacy, and meaningful offline opportunities, California can preserve the benefits of innovation while protecting the necessary human experiences that lead to purpose and healthy development. Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.

Thank you for that testimony. Wanna circle back to doctor Ira. You provided a data point. 58% of those, polled did not ever seek the type of contact content that was being presented to them through social media platforms. Is that correct?

Yeah. That is, first usage. So I first of all, I should clarify, I'm going from memory, so I should but this is the study that David Saki referenced as far as, like, first online exposure. So it's not all phonetic exposure. It is the first exposure.

And so in that study, younger kids, more than 50%, I believe it's 58%, said that they were not looking for it. So it was unintentional exposure in that first exposure to pornography.

Correct. Thank you for clarifying that. Maybe anecdotal, but my wife and I had the opportunity to to travel abroad. We were in Europe for a bit this July. And interestingly enough, that was a very similar experience to the one that I had.

I have a social media account as a public official. And while searching for restaurants and things to do in the area that we were in, I noticed a very stark difference between what was being auto populated on my feed versus what is being auto populated on my feed when I got back to The States. And I think that goes to that data point that you just shared.

You're not necessarily looking for this information or this content, yet it is being put forth in front of you. And not comparing apples to oranges, but we had an opioid epidemic in this nation, a very tragic situation that caused so much harm.

And it was one of those things as well. Right? Well intended at first or with the intent of reducing pain and helping folks cope with their health situation, yet it spiraled into something that was completely out of control, and now we're also dealing with many of those aftermath.

So I'd like to just ask a general question around, you know, holding accountability for the misinformation that gets put out there or for the deliberate act of pushing, a product, if you will, because it's how they view, a lot of this content. And, you know, downstream, the implications of these, these products being pushed, in front of our youth, and in front of society.

Just any general thoughts on that.

So, I do a lot of work with, like, the age generation team on kids online safety. I think we all know these things are bad for us. Right? Like, we a lot of adults, you know, we think we spend too much time on our phones too. A lot of adults spend too much time on video games.

They gamble too much. Adults are allowed to do things that are bad for themselves. I think we understand that it's manipulative to present the same opportunities for kids. Right? Like, if you come to my if you offer me a cookie, it's fine.

You offer my four year old a cookie and ask him to do something, you know, he's not able to control himself. And somewhere between four and 51, you know, you develop that that ability, and we generally don't like kids. So I think, yeah, the responsibility for kids is certainly on the tech companies because we don't let people manipulate kids. Right?

We we now we adults have a little bit more responsibility, but we still have rules about disclosure and transparency, and, you know, there are things that are manipulative for adults as well.

So I think we need to consider, like, how we protect adults, especially, like, the elderly. There's a lot of work on, like, scams for the elderly. But I think for kids, clearly, the responsibility is on the tech companies because they have, you know, thousands of designers, the best talent in the world, figuring out how to get you, you know, to do a thing. And, you know, the average, you know, 12 year old boy just is can't compete with that. Awesome.

The Common Sense Media is sponsoring A Bill authored by Assembly member Lowenthal AB 2 related to platform accountability and holding companies accountable when they have a negligent design to their product. Do you look at you go to Toys R Us and, you know, you have a product that's a toy that is a choking hazard. If a if a single kid is harmed, that's obviously a liability for the manufacturer. That's not necessarily the case for social media platforms.

And now we're seeing courts view this through a slightly different lens where you're seeing these juries side with survivor parents in these cases.

And I think the way to really change the behavior of these platforms is to to hit them where it hurts, and that's their bottom line.

Awesome. Thank you for that. And through the research that you've all conducted or the work in this space that you've also done, you know, figuring out how we either redefine or better understand what it means to develop this technology versus restricting this technology or best case use for this technology. Right? And there's been a long standing debate here in the legislature between those two points.

I am, you know, I am pleased to see that these conversations are moving forward, and legislation is moving through, the process to address some of these issues. But any ideas in terms of how we can continue to expand on that work as well? Because at the end of the day, you know, California is the home of this technology.

It's what helps us generate the revenue that we do, and by no means do we want to hinder that because it would have, you know, long term implications to the way California runs. But at the same time, we want to ensure that these technologies, these products are not only continuing to grow, but also doing so in the best way possible to also lead the nation and potentially the globe as well.

Take that. There's few bills. I know Assemblymember Bauer-Kahan sitting on your committees, real active in this arena as well as, you know, yourself and others here. So, we're supporting the social media delay authored by Assembly member Lowenthal. Of course, Senator Padilla's efforts around, AI toys and and banning them.

You know, Common Sense Media has worked in New York where we have our chatbots bill on the governor's desk. Earlier this year, we authored a we've have a variety of research reports on most most of the topics that have been discussed here in this panel today. We have one on just how prolific gambling is amongst kids, aged 11 to 17. Over a third of kids have gambled in the last year.

We worked with Assembly member, Schiavo, on a bill to address predictive markets and try and ban them for for young folks and looking forward to continuing to move the ball forward on that effort as well.

But there's quite a few efforts in this arena and just look forward to continuing this work.

I mean, I just say that, you know, I think your question is just about how do we preserve the good and not get rid of, you know, get rid of the bad and not not lose the good. And, you know, as a kid, I love technology. I mean, technology, you know and I even I play in a fantasy football league. Like, all gambling is not terrible. Like, question is, like, how do we get these things to be useful?

Right? Like, how do we get them to be tools for the things we want to do as opposed to things that just get us to use them more? And we somehow lost that, and that's why people are disenchanted with technology because it's so I think, you know, whatever the technology is and just going, you know, technology by technology. You guys have you know, you started with social media. You're addressing AI chat bots.

Now let's look at gambling. Let's look at gaming. Like, what are the ways that these things are getting us to do things more than we want to? And how do we get them to be tools that enable us to achieve our aspirations, not profit for companies. And I think if you just keep with that paradigm because it's gonna keep happening.

Right? It's that's just how Silicon Valley works. It's gonna keep trying to get you to use things more. We just keep applying that playbook. Eventually, I think the tech industry will get the message.

Sure. Thank you for that. And just lastly, doctor Nagata, thank you for bringing the male health perspective and this, at times, unachievable image of what the male alpha physical prototype should be. As a former athlete, played football at a very high level, I would argue that I did everything in my ability, to try and achieve, a certain level of athleticism. You know, eight hours of sleep counted, my nutrition macros, worked out with, you know, the different teams that I did, trained independently as well.

And despite that, was never able to to break through a certain threshold that my own physical genetic can actually achieve. And I think it is a point that we do need to make and and discuss publicly a bit more the fine line between being healthy and these unachievable standards and metrics that are being pushed. Right? So any thoughts in terms of how we walk that fine line?

Because what I don't think would be helpful is turning completely the other way and getting folks to not be physically active.

Right? So there is a a positive tone to motivating individuals, especially young men, to get out and be physically active. Right? But, of course, if that threshold is passed, that's when the the consequences come into play. So is there a magic formula?

Is there a different path, a different approach to achieving that goal without, the the negative consequences?

Yeah. That's a great question, and thank you for sharing that, your experience. I do think that, yeah, in general, I don't want anybody to come out of here thinking that they shouldn't be physically active and, you know, eat healthy. And I think the first point is just that it's generally under recognized that guys care about their body image. In our national surveys, two thirds of high school teenage boys are reporting that they're doing something to change their appearance, bulk up.

And so I think the common narrative is, like, guys just don't care, and girls are the ones who really care about their body image, but I think that's actually just not true. So I think that just normalizing that this is a normal part of adolescent development for for everyone, is important. And then specifically related to, like, the fitness influencers, yeah, I think that as we've all mentioned, there are you know, there is, like, positive content.

And I think in general, people who, like, are promoting healthy physical activity in moderation, that's fine. I think where the fine line is, at least for me, when things become disordered are kind of like the the distinction between kind of like substance use disorders or addictive disorders, where, the sort of obsession with becoming muscular or one's appearance actually starts to impact your social relationships, your daily functioning, or, lead to, like, serious health consequences.

That's sort of when when sort of normal behavior tips over into disordered content or disordered behaviors. And so I do think that and I think that that's just generally underrecognized in boys and men. But in terms of potential policies, as I mentioned, there technically are some policies in place on paper, at least, at some of the platforms that say, like, you know, like, illegal products like anabolic steroids or certain substances, like, should not be marketed towards minors.

But as a similar study has found that many minors still, without searching for it, do still get come across as content, for steroids or illegal products and, and or substance use, which is overwhelmingly portrayed on social media in a positive light. Like, people are not posting about the detrimental consequences they had.

It's all about, like, oh, I got really muscular. Look at me.

Many influencers were actually encouraging young people to engage and consume those types of products as well. Right? Just freely and out loud and saying the reason that I've become so popular or successful is because I did x, y, and z. And it's an interesting it's an interesting approach because you're you're actively advocating for something that is illegal

Yes.

To do. Yet you're monetizing off of that illegality. So, you know, appreciate you bringing up that point as well.

Yeah. And I think it's very, hard to tell actually what are the kickbacks for some of these influencers. Like, many of them do get, you know, you know, some amount of compensation for the ads that they're doing. And I think on social media, it's very hard sometimes to tell what are actually ads and what is, you know, an individual's content. So I do think that trying to limit some of those more harmful features, especially to minors, could be important.

Awesome. Thank you for that. With that, we will conclude our second panel. Thank you very much to the three of you and then also, to our first panel. This conversation, will continue as I stated in my opening remarks.

This is the first component of a very wide ranging systemic issue. I look forward to follow-up discussions around potential policy that we could work on collectively, and this is going to be an ongoing fight.

We heard from, doctor Kaye that it is very unlikely that we will ever be able to provide a counter that is as as consuming and addicting and attractive than what maybe we are seeing today in the social space, but really focusing on developing alternatives to ensure that folks at least have that option. And I think that will make a big difference in being able to support our young individuals, especially our young boys at a time of crisis and need.

So with that, thank you all, and this meeting is is adjourned.

Appreciate you brother. Thank you, man.