In this episode, Jamie sits down with Dr. Lisa Strohman, clinical psychologist, former FBI profiler, and founder of Digital Citizen Academy, to talk about the hidden cost of growing up online and what it’s going to take to protect the next generation. Drawing from her work in federal law enforcement, public policy, and clinical psychology, Lisa breaks down how screen time, social media, and AI are reshaping childhood, identity, and mental health. They explore why social media is more dangerous than it seems, what AI literacy should really look like in schools, and how trauma is manifesting in today’s classrooms. Lisa also shares the tools she’s building to train students, support educators, and equip parents for the digital world ahead. Whether you're raising kids, teaching them, or shaping the systems around them, this conversation will change how you think about tech and childhood.
We talk a lot about protecting our kids’ future, but the real fight is happening in classrooms, living rooms, and phone screens every single day.
In this episode, Jamie sits down with Dr. Lisa Strohman, clinical psychologist, former FBI profiler, and founder of Digital Citizen Academy, to talk about the real psychological and societal cost of unchecked technology and what it’s going to take to reverse course.
Lisa brings a uniquely powerful perspective. She has been on the ground at Quantico profiling predators, in the halls of Congress crafting policy, and in therapy rooms with the families paying the price. Her work now centers on one mission: to give kids, parents, and educators the tools to fight back against a digital world they never signed up for.
Together, they dig into:
If you’re a parent, educator, policymaker, or just someone who wants to understand how we ended up here and what we can do about it, this is the episode you can’t afford to miss.
About Dr. Stohman
Dr. Lisa Strohman has widely become known for her advocacy and education around mental wellness as it relates to our digital lives. She has worked with thousands of parents, schools and children around the globe. An attorney, clinical psychologist, and author, Dr. Strohman established the Digital Citizen Academy, a non-profit program offered to schools with an in-home plan that educates, empowers and inspires balance and prosocial use of technology.
She is the founder and director of Digital Citizen Academy, one of the first organizations to address the global issue of technology addiction and overuse. As a licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Strohman has spent more than a decade working with individual, family and adolescent clients struggling with issues including depression, anxiety, addiction and technology overuse.
Recognizing the growing challenges parents now face with their children, and the increasingly serious issues her young patients are dealing with due to our growing dependency on technology, inspired Dr. Strohman to launched the Technology Wellness Center, which she co-founded with Dr. Melissa Westendorf JD, PhD in 2014.
With her work in schools and in the media Dr. Strohman recognized the need for prevention education and diversion programs and founded Digital Citizen Academy for students, educators and parents addressing these issues related to technology.
Dr. Strohman attended the University of California, Davis where she received a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, graduating Magna Cum Laude. She then completed a joint, integrated program in law and Psychology at Villanova and Drexel Universities.
During her undergraduate career, Dr. Strohman gained experience as a lead program coordinator with Families for Early Autism Treatment (FEAT), as a family reunification therapist and a hospice counselor. While attending graduate school, she performed research in substance abuse, risk communication and child abduction. Her avid interest in public policy earned her the honor of becoming a legislative intern for Congress. She was also selected as an honors intern with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and invited to become a visiting scholar with the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime division as she completed her dissertation.
After earning her Juris Doctorate, Strohman worked at a large law firm, while completing her residency at the Arizona State Hospital in both a clinical and forensic rotation in clinical psychology. She eventually settled back into her counseling practice as the clinical psychologist with Lifescape Medical Associates, where she utilizes her training in cognitive behavior therapy to help patients.
In addition to establishing the Technology Wellness Center, Dr. Strohman and Dr. Westendorf developed an assessment test to help parents identify if their child is at risk from technology overuse. The two have also co-authored a book, Unplug: Raising Kids in a Technology Addicted World, published in July 2015.
In an effort to educate parents, caregivers and students, Dr. Strohman is a guest speaker to schools, parent organizations and students to help raise awareness and offer preventative tools and resources. She is also frequently featured in the media as an expert source for issues related to technology use and behavior, including a weekly feature on Dr. Drew’s radio show as well as an expert on Dr. Oz’s ShareCare site.
Guest Quote
“ I don't want to overwhelm people with here’s how it can be really super dangerous. I want to really give that picture of tech as a tool is awesome, tech as a toy, not so much. So let's kind of look at what the good and the bad of it is.”
Time Stamps
00:00 Episode Start
01:35 Lisa's Early Life and Background
04:13 Lisa's Professional Journey and Achievements
07:35 Experiences in Law and Psychology
17:01 Challenges and Insights from Government Work
26:48 Impact of Technology on Critical Thinking
34:23 Rethinking the Formative Years
40:34 Digital Citizens Academy: Addressing the Problem
47:39 Challenges in Education and Social Media
54:26 Scaling Solutions for Schools
01:03:44 The Role of AI in Education
01:27:02 Executive Order: AI Training for All
01:32:33 The Roundup
Sponsor
Ever To Conquer is brought to you by RedLeif, a digital agency focused on accelerating the modernization and security of public sector data. Visit RedLeif.io to learn more.
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[00:00:00] Jamie Grant: I think social media is warfare in the sense of like, we battle it and there are certain battles that I just don't think we can win until we recognize we're in a battle.
[00:00:09] Dr. Lisa Strohman: If I walked into a house as a parent and there was unfettered internet access on one table and then there was a gun on a second table, I would say I would be more terrified of my child having access to the unfettered internet than I would the gun.
[00:00:34] Jamie Grant: Alright, y'all, welcome back to another episode of The Ever to Conquer. My name's Jamie Grant, your host. I am super excited today, uh, to have a guest with us that is, is becoming a friend. Uh, we're gonna continue the education theme for a couple, uh, for, for at least one more episode here. And when I say that like I'm gonna get educated today, uh, y'all are gonna get educated.
Today, we're also gonna talk about some really cool stuff happening in education with Dr. Lisa Strohman. Um, Doc, Lisa, however you'd like to be referred as we talk through it, um, I know you do work all over the country on tv, in person with patients, uh, to take time outta your schedule to come do this. We really appreciate it and just wanna welcome you.
[00:01:14] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
[00:01:16] Jamie Grant: So we try, uh, to kind of kick off and sometimes I gloss over it and don't do a very good job. I think your story is incredible. Um, I still laugh about the time we met and we got introduced by a mutual friend who was like, yeah, you two have similar backgrounds and then you told your background and I was like, we do not have similar backgrounds.
Um, but for the audience that doesn't know you or hasn't seen your work, um, can you give just a little bit of background about who Lisa is?
[00:01:43] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Sure. You know, I always say, when people ask me, I'm like, I'm, listen. I'm just like a small town farm girl trying to make it in the world. It's really, um, kind of my quick answer.
But I grew up, uh, in Northern California with divorced. I spent half my life homeless, um, bouncing in and outta houses with my mom. Uh, learned a lot about life in those moments. And then I had a dad in law enforcement that was really stable and really was kind of this person who in the seventies, uh, was a sole, uh, custody of me.
Um, so it was, it was a really interesting life with a lot of strife. And I would say around second grade, I kind of was like, what is life? Why am I here? And I was like eight. And so I had this existential crisis as a child. Um, and I had a second grade teacher and she really kind of watched me, like, had me come in at lunch, made sure I had food.
Um, a lot of times I was like, not clean, I didn't have food, and she just kind of like took me aside and like made sure I got the testing and told me I could basically be whatever I wanted in this world. And, um, Mrs. Allison made me a, a. Deal, uh, in second grade, and I would say probably not old enough to consent when I look back.
Um, but she was like, I will give you jelly beans for life if you take these tests. And I was like, cool. Like, and it was like an all day Saturday. Um, and what it was, it assessed me and it, it basically put me into this gifted program. Uh, and I got this plastic, um, necklace of jelly beans that I felt really tricked on.
So, um, but I wear it every time I do an educational conference or I travel, I have Mrs. Ellison's jelly beans with me. And, um, it just gave me this like, love for, you know, looking for those kids that need extra help. And, um, I've been in the field ever since and advocating and developing and, and trying to help where I can.
[00:03:42] Jamie Grant: So I didn't even know that part of your background. Oh, sorry. No, that's incredible. Like, I'm so glad. That's why we love to do this thing kind of unfiltered, right? Um. Man, there's, there's so many places and that, that gives such great context where I know some of the work you're doing like that, that, that makes so much sense.
I want to, we'll come back to it 'cause I don't want, I, I want folks to kind of understand professionally where you went from there. And when you say in the field, um, you know, we're gonna have some folks that, that have seen your books, podcasts, like that stuff. But for somebody who has no idea kind of what you've done professionally, um, let's go to that chapter.
And then I really wanna, I wanna make sure we circle back in this conversation because I don't think, I, not, I know I was 40 years old when I learned like the term childhood drama and even began to have the conversations about attunement, attachment, experiential stuff that, I mean, as a healthy kid that grew up with a lifestyle that was very different than yours, that everybody from the outside would look in and said, it's super easy.
I had to do some really deep discovery on the little boy and figure out, wait, why do these patterns exist? So I'm fascinated by the topic. It's what drew me to your work in, in some regards, but without knowing the context. So I don't wanna take us there yet.
[00:05:00] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Yeah. Okay. But
[00:05:01] Jamie Grant: I would love for you to give just kind of the professional background of, of Lisa or Dr.
Sherman to, to say, Hey, you know, this is where I came from, but then this is what I started doing.
[00:05:11] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Sure. Uh, so I would say probably in high, in high school was kind of, um, the beginning of where I was like, uh, starting this work of like, I really wanna do something that helps other kids. I wasn't really sure, I didn't have any money for college.
Uh, so I was working my way through college and I met a professor. I went to uc, Davis, and I went into psychology. And this professor was like, Hey, you're working with this family that has autistic children. They had four. I had gotten them into Stanford studies and doing some research on the fact that.
You know, you have this, um, Polish mom who is like very high trained in the nursing, um, program, and then the dad who is Russian. And so there's a lot of, like, at the time, um, information we're trying to look at like where is autism starting from? And you know, they just had this massive family. And so I ran a team, did like some policy work with them, uh, brought them resources.
And so this professor was like, you should do a JD PhD. And so I was like, okay, you know what? Nobody told
[00:06:10] Jamie Grant: me in law school. They were like, you should just try and graduate law school kid. Like we don't need PhD. Part of it. Like just get to the bar.
[00:06:17] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Just get through. Yeah. Well, and as you know, you don't really know what you don't know.
So, um, I was like, cool, like I'll do that. So, um, so I applied and there was three programs at the time and I applied to the one at, in, uh, Philadelphia. So Drexel and um, Villanova were the joint program. I applied and the kind of the head guy, Dr. Bergoff was like the head of ethics and all the things. I took the test, the lsat, the pH, I had to take the lsat, the GRE and the GRE psych nailed the GRE psych, GRE, like I had like perfect scores on like a lot of that, the lsat, I got like a one at the time.
I think it was like a 180 2 or something like that. It was like a great score, which is close to perfect.
[00:07:03] Jamie Grant: Yeah.
[00:07:04] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Yeah. So he's like, well, you know, if you would've gotten like a 180 4, I could have guaranteed you, there's only five spots, right? So I was like, okay, I'm gonna go take it again. 'cause this is how stubborn I am.
I got the little alley cat in me. So I was like, so I went and took it and I called him back. I was like, uh, Dr. Eff. I said, I, uh, I received my score. It should be in your inbox. I got a 180 4. And he said, uh, well welcome to the program. So, so I didn't know what I was fighting to get into. I just like, was so pissed that somebody told me no at that point.
So, um, so that's where I started this, this career of, um, law and psychology. It was an incredible experience. I worked in Congress for a, a stint in a summer. I worked for, um, a California congressman. I was a legislative assistant there. Uh, I found out in 1998 that women weren't allowed in certain spots on the Capitol Rotunda.
Uh, I went to go deliver the votes, uh, that my legislative director and three other male colleagues sent me to go deliver. And I remember having grown up with my dad and my brother, like, these guys are back there laughing and thinking she's never gonna get it through. And I thought, I don't think Larry Capital Police Officer Larry's gonna shoot me.
So I just pushed through and I remember thinking like, this is probably not the place for me if there's like locked doors and like secret societies. Um, in the nineties. So I did not stay in politics. I went back and the next year went and worked for the FBI as an honors intern. So you have to apply. They take in undergrad and graduate students.
I was placed in the profiling unit at the time in Quantico. Uh, Louis Free was the director at the time, and I did homicidal pedophilia, which was. Mind chilling and awful because, you know, 387 cases, my task was where did these guys end up? Uh, and where were they? Had they been released? Were they still in prison?
And I had to do this massive report, which meant I had to look at all the pictures and it just really tore my heart and soul. I started having night terrors again, and it was just, it was just like a really difficult time. And at the end of it, uh, director free pulled me in and he's like, you do really nice work.
We'd love for, to sponsor your dissertation on infant abduction. So how do you profile somebody who steals a baby zero to one years of age? They had never done so my, that's my dissertation. And my, my research for my degree was in that with ncmec, national Center of Missing Exploited Children. And so I spent about seven years with the Bureau in total, and that gave me the foundation that I think that you were asking about, uh, to be here because I was sitting in the offices in Quantico when Columbine happened.
And I remember sitting there and watching all of the agencies came together in that moment, and they all came. And I remember thinking the greatest minds of our country missed this. And our children, this is before we, I mean, I was in my twenties, I didn't have kids. And I remember thinking like, they're gonna use the internet different.
And we didn't have social media at the time, but we had these boxes of printouts that Eric Harris had posted already online through the internet. And I just remember thinking like, this is gonna be bad and we've gotta buckle in. And so I've been in the space of psychology and technology since that moment.
Is that the background?
[00:10:22] Jamie Grant: It's so good. And there's so much like, uh, I'm, I, when I laughed, just to be clear, when I laughed in the middle of that, before anybody gets confused on timeline, I laughed when you said, uh, I had to take the LSAT and the GRE my dad was trying to convince me as a lawyer who had had some success.
My brother is a savant of a trial lawyer, the best talent I've ever seen in a courtroom. He's 14 years older than me. Um, and I thought, like when I showed up, when I showed up at Auburn, this is actually a true story. I showed up at Auburn for orientation and I saw the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen and she was gonna get a political science major.
Uh, and so I thought, well, my whole family is lawyers. I'm gonna get a political science major with her. And my dad's like, don't get a poli sci major. Like, it doesn't do anything for you other than get you into law school and you don't even know if you want to do that. Like go get a business degree. And so we kinda like battled through it.
I got a business degree once I finally convinced myself to try hard enough to get through calculus. But then. When I'm getting ready to leave Auburn, it's like, wait, am I going to the real world or am I doing more school? And, uh, this will help you profile me. I was like, wait, the GRE seems like a lot of studying.
The LSAT just seems like logic that I can take and keep going. And so I took the lsat, ended up in law school and then said, I hate practicing law, and here I am. So there's something about my resistance to effort sometimes that kept me from the GRE. But when you said, yeah, I took both, I was like, who does that?
Um, I wanna, I want to, um, make sure, uh, folks understand this. When you, when you talked about, uh, 'cause I'm, I'm super fascinated. I, I, you know better than I do and can tell me whether I'm right or wrong. I think there's certain things the human brain is just not designed to see and experience. Like I think the human brain is this treasure that we're born with that.
S like the, the folks that have to do the Google image search screening. Right. When? When, oh yeah. I don't know if you've seen any of that. Yes, absolutely. I mean, they're having to tag, it sounds, maybe cl like people glaze over it, but it's like, is this suitable for Google? Well, that has all sorts of categories of violence, sex in different things.
When you were doing, you said the homicidal pedophilia, and you described it like you were looking at where they went after. So if, if I'm making sure I understand this. We've got somebody that's been convicted, done time, and now you're doing the profile work of what happened to them subsequent to the event.
Is that right? Yes. Yep. How important was that to then be able to do the prospecting, profiling work you described where you said, Hey, I've, because what I hear you saying, and I wanna make sure we understand it, is like I've done the, like the, the root cause analysis, let's say, on each of these cases. Now I wanna apply that to how we profile the people that are taking children zero to one, so that we could hopefully prevent that.
Am I tracking that right? And how would you describe, like, correct me or maybe explain how those two experiences played together?
[00:13:27] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Yeah. Well, and a third experience in the same time was having the ability to be on, on scene in this unit, which is, you know, off, it's basically by the FBI, um, academy and like we ba and there's like a building and that's where all the profiles are.
I actually got to sit through active cases that came through as well, so like as they were doing it. So I was never classified as a profiler. I was a visiting scholar after I was an honors intern. So just to clarify that. But I was in that space and I was friends with all of them. So the research I was doing for sure was what was the sentencing guidelines?
Where did they end up, what was the crime that they created? And so we had this whole rubric of. Data that we're looking at post hoc of the event. Right? And so your question is, when I look at what's happening, um, from that moment, and I do zero to one years of age, I will tell you that how that happened.
Louis Free was a very Catholic religious man. He was very, um, family oriented. And I wish I would've had Who is, who is
[00:14:32] Jamie Grant: Louis free for our folks?
[00:14:34] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Oh, Louis Free, the director of the FBI. Okay. Uh, would've been in the late nineties, um, into the two thousands when I was there. And I wish I would've had a cell phone back in those days because his office was, here's a wall with all of his like diplomas and like the flag, and this is where you take a picture of him and then here's a wall with a bookcase and all of the things.
And he had a private wall that was all of his children's artwork, like, and it was just paper, just like we do as parents. And it was just the most heartwarming thing he said to me. I remember in a meeting he said, Lisa. He said, we don't have hundreds or thousands of these cases every day, but women, and this is what happened, women were starting to get abducted outta parking lots pregnant.
And he said, we shut down the hospital. So some of us will remember that there was this huge issue and we, Jayco happened. And if you had kids after a certain time, you had a wristband and your child had a wristband, and either the child stayed in the room with you or those wristbands had to match at all times if that child was traveling anywhere.
That was, that was to combat people who were going into hospitals and just like lifting babies, pretending to be photographers, all of the things. And so when we did that, the consequence to that action to protect these children within those units was women on the outside who were just going to set up their nurseries and shopping at malls and nursery and targets were getting abducted out of the parking lot, pulled over, drugged, um, murdered, and babies cut out of them.
And he was like, one is too many on my watch and I want to figure out who's doing this and what that offender looks like. So that's, you know, I think a lot of times in law enforcement, it takes a leader. It takes somebody who's like, let's figure out the why. And, and again, like zero to one years of age, people don't think about that age.
But I will tell you, it's a very, very, um, uh, just tragic, I would say, um, situation because you lose a, a mother, you lose a family, the child disappears. Um, and what he said to me at the time was, I know your heart is hurting from this work I put you on. I want you to have something that is like rewarding and 87% of those babies are found and he's right.
You know, it's, it's a better outcome. But, um, but it also difficult.
[00:16:55] Jamie Grant: Would you agree? Um, because I think the other thing I hear you kind of saying. And I wanna make sure this, uh, implying, um, and maybe this is just me projecting, but when I think about the three years I did in government, um, they were, hell, like, it was, it was the worst environment I've ever worked in.
It was the, it was, I, I, I, I openly talk about that. When I left the state CCIO job, I was in the worst shape of my life. And some people go, yeah, you were pretty heavy. And I'm like, yeah, that was the obvious part. But like the spiritual, emotional, relational, like all the other stuff, the, I mean, I was in the worst place I've ever been in.
And at the same time, the experience on the inside, like, because I gave everything to it, two things are true. Like I completely lost myself in that job.
[00:17:52] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:53] Jamie Grant: Because I was giving everything to it. Also, now that I've kind of stepped back and, and stepped away for a while and taking care of those things.
I can look back and go, man, I had experience that is absolutely invaluable. That now allows us to apply it in a way that's very productive. So I wouldn't want to go through it again and I wouldn't really want anyone to go through it again. But if you were gonna kinda give the pitch to people, because I do think this is, this is a trend that I think, I hope that we start seeing more of.
If you were to give a pitch to a talented professional that you think has something to offer the FBI or any other public institution on kind of a tour of service, like they've been successful in their private sector job, and you go, man, go do two, three years, what, how do you think the time you spent as even an intern or a scholar and then.
Do you think that you could be doing the work you're doing now without that experience? Or how would you pitch somebody on do it, tour a service, be on the lookout for this, and this is how to get the most out of it?
[00:19:05] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Uh, that's a fantastic question and I, I would say do it. I would not be here without that time.
And to your point, I mean, I literally, I was married at the time. I'm in grad school. I'm driving from, you know, Quantico back to Philly, Philly on the weekends to see my husband who was in med school at the time. I remember I would cry every day. I left every time I left on, on Sunday, um, to drive back to Quantico.
You know, it was the hardest time to your point of my life. Um, and I do remember at the time Philly had like the unhealthiest like population in the world and I was like, oh my God, you're coming from California. Like they put like canned mushrooms on their sandwiches. I was like, what is this? Like,
[00:19:48] Jamie Grant: it's like the opposite of the south where we fry everything.
Y'all process everything up there like
[00:19:53] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Right, right. And it's coming from like Northern California. I both, but yeah, we have like fresh fruit and like all of the things. So anyway, so, but I would say to your question on should you serve and do that, I wouldn't be here without that. I have some of the, yeah, tightest friendships.
The biggest, I, I think broadband respect of, hey, I went here, this is the work that I did. And what I learned from myself was nobody really all has all the answers, but we can figure them out together. And I remember thinking in that space of like, okay, this is just going to take grit and resilience and you know, all of the things as a child I had learned and I remember thinking like, I can get through anything if I do it day by day and the lessons I'm learning.
Through the National Center for Missing Exploited Children. Like understanding how, you know, at the time, like JonBenet case and all of the things, like, it's like there were some really big things that happened in this space where you, that I had like an inside window to, and what it did for me was that critical thinking piece, which I think a lot of kids don't have nowadays.
Um, because we don't have the Dewey Decimal system in the library and we don't have the need to go and look up books and find them in the library. It's like everything is on this like device that we have. So they, those steps, and I don't mean to think that they can't speak, think critically, but when you're in a space where you're operating like that, you have to really go upstream and be like, how did this person end up here?
And that's what that time at the profiling unit gave to me. It was like, you know, you know, I, I don't know how these individuals have such evil in their world that they turn out this way. I wanna find out why. And so working with John Douglas and like having him come in and talk about the serial killers he had interviewed and all of, you know, it was just this camel up moment in my time in my life that I can't, I can't replicate.
[00:21:49] Jamie Grant: Yeah. So I, man, there's so much good stuff and there's, so, um, I feel like talking to you is like constantly exercising my discipline on the A DHD 'cause there's like six places I could go. Uh, and I, and I love, uh, so much of that. I, I, um, I had, I forget where it came from, but a friend at one point said to me, this is probably, this is maybe 10 years ago, something like that.
And there was either a study or somebody had just said like, you know, when you're sitting in a group of friends and somebody goes, Hey, who won the national championship that year? What was the actor in that movie? Like, you're in conversation, you're trying to remember it. And they were basically taking the, the, the kind of, the, the takeaway was quit going to Google and actually exercise the process of the recall.
Um. And that's one thing that I kind of was thinking as you were talking, that I feel I, I'm now finding myself doing that with uh, GPT or roc. It's like, hey, time out before I go there for recall. Let's exercise that thing. Mm-hmm. Two, I think, and I'd love your take on this 'cause you can give like the clinical answer to my kind of redneck takeaway is that the brain is also a muscle in, in either literal or metaphor.
I don't know if literally right, but like if we quit exercising it, like that has an, an atrophy effect that I experience in my, like I just experience it that I realize I notice it. And then maybe the other that I think you're just, gosh, this is so good. I obsess over first order principles and like as a team, whether I'm on a team or leading a team, it's like, what's behind that?
What's bigger than that? What's the why behind? Like let's keep pulling all the threads to make sure we get back to the end. And I think that profiling work you're describing and a lot of the work you're doing and, and I want to dive. Kind of take us here in a second into that work. 'cause I think it's just incredible.
I don't even know that I have a question there. Uh, but, but the other thing I wanted to tell you, um, maybe this is the question. This is where, this is where I was going. Um, I was in the middle of a crazy legislative session. It was my, I think it was my last legislative session and I was carrying five or six bills that were all nuclear, like, just crazy.
And, uh, that led to me hiring a crisis communications director because somebody on my team was like, Hey buddy, you can't like deal with all this on your own. Like, you, you need to have somebody that's like a set of eyes and, and actually coaching you through it. And she, uh, texted me the morning of Parkland and she said, Hey, um, you need to go find your, your buddies from South Florida because there's a, a school shooting happening.
And it just so happened that Jared Moskovitz was a Democrat. We'd done a lot of work across the aisle together. I didn't know that Jared went to Parkland at the time, but I went kind. Uh, to the back of the chamber where he sat and, and said, Hey man, like, I don't know if you've seen this, but like, this is what's going on.
And that was really the, the only, I'll say school shooting that I felt like I kind of lived through. And I don't even like saying lived through, uh, because that, um, I wanna be really careful with my words here. The people who lived through it were at Parkland,
[00:24:50] Dr. Lisa Strohman: right?
[00:24:51] Jamie Grant: But what you're touching on that I think brings these two things together.
This is way too many words to try and process this. We simultaneously live in a society that doesn't love and embrace critical thinking anymore. It simultaneously lives in headlines and fast and click bait, and then it collides around a tragedy like a Columbine or a Parkland, where I think the people who really want to dig in and understand, like, how did we get here?
How do we stop it? Are I felt like I was facing a tidal wave in the press that just said, just take all the guns, just hire all the schools. Nobody wanted to really do the long work. After the headlines were gone to really dig in. And fortunately we had some policymakers that really wanted to drive that way.
A speaker at the time, who was really gonna drive that way. How do we, you know, in like the cable news environment or now like the, the X or Instagram environment where, I mean the Coldplay content this week with an affair, like, I mean, you can't get away from it. And that one had long legs. Long legs meant like a week.
[00:26:00] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:02] Jamie Grant: Do you, how, how do we unpack that? I don't even know what the question I'm trying to ask Lisa, but I hear you touching on all of that where it's like the clickbait, we don't critically think truth is now optional and no longer a necessity in these conversations, and yet we're talking about like these gross tragedies, which should be the one thing that demands us to like put down all politics.
All ambition, all attention and validation and glory seeking and go like, man, there's a tragedy here. How did we get here? And how do we try and make sure this is the last one with like intellectual honesty. Does that make any sense or did I just like throw up at you from,
[00:26:41] Dr. Lisa Strohman: well, my superpower with my a, DD is to grab all the pieces and pull it together.
So let's see if I can do it. Um, it's quite the challenge. We're gonna do it together though. So, so critical thinking. We, when we don't use that brain as you spoke of, we actually lose mass in our brain. So what we know now is that the white matter in our brain, which is the parts that cause is processing the part that we can critically think, all of that part, that cre that creates our essence of ourself starts to atrophy.
So we see the actual density of that tissue deteriorate. If you're on like. And what we, I'm looking at in my space is if we're on kind of play or toyer, um, inconsequential tech or social media for more than two hours a day, more than two hours a day, the average wait, say, whoa,
[00:27:34] Jamie Grant: whoa, whoa, whoa. Right? Say that again.
[00:27:37] Dr. Lisa Strohman: More than two hours. Being quietly more than two hours a day on something that I call junk tech versus tech as a tool. Junk tech creates a loss and an atrophy of your brain mass. We, we see the science, we can see it happening. Gene Twingy out of, uh, uc, San Diego does a ton of this work. Dr. Daniel Aman does a ton of this work.
We can see the brain deteriorating and the other part of it on the graphic will show you the white matter. And the white matter of our brain is a super highway. So if you're trying to get from, uh, Florida to California, you gotta take a ton of highways to get there. If you are a kid or an adult and you're trying to think through why did this happen and how do we get here?
Who won the national championship? You gotta travel that highway to the other side to figure out that answer. And we also see that we start to get potholes in that. So imagine how much harder it would be if there's detours all the way along because that white matter is also disintegrating. So from a structural, you're not so far off that we aren't critically thinking we are losing brain mass and nobody's really talking about it.
I, I think one of the things that I find when I go and talk to families and I talk in front of schools globally, the kids, when they hear this information, I never, I didn't use to talk to kids about it, but when I start to tell them and show them the pictures, they're like, why? It, it's like me feeding them drugs or me telling them to go ride a bicycle without a helmet or, you know, get in a car without buckling a seatbelt.
They look at me like, why is no adult telling me? So I think that we're, we're being throttled on that information from the big tech. They have a lot of money, they hide a lot of the data. Um, but we know that that's there. So you're not far off. When we talk about critically thinking and what that means in that space, and then when you think about, you know, the Parkland shootings and Uvalde and Columbine, you know, and why that's happening and trying to get upstream from that, what you're talking about.
And when you say that you felt it, this is when I went through it, and then you corrected yourself. I don't want you to have to correct yourself, but I think it's important to learn. There's primary, secondary and tertiary traumas. Primary traumas are the people that were on that campus. They were in that event.
A secondary trauma is somebody who's watching that event, right? And so imagine that secondary trauma is like we weren't actually in danger ourselves, but we are so close to it and we see it happening, which is what our devices do, right? They put us there. Tertiary traumas. What are the effects of that?
Right. What are the effects that we have of that? And even if we didn't witness it or watch it happen on live TV or on stream, we actually have a tertiary trauma of it because our whole landscape as a family, as a society is changing. So I think that it's important in that space because we all feel it and we are experiencing these traumas that are happening to us.
And so it's to me, like when I, I actually, I actually gave a speech in front of the folks and several of the families from Parkland were there. And it was the only time I've ever been on stage. I was nervous because I felt palpably that emotional connection to them because of my experience with them.
Although it was a way, um, of what they went through. So.
[00:30:57] Jamie Grant: So, so you, you just reminded me of something that I'd forgotten about, but, but you, uh, you've been a legislative assistant. You know how whipping votes can happen, right? Yes. Like, I think when people, uh, from the outside don't know the legislative world, whipping can be relatively intense, right?
It can be kind of like the application of leverage by leadership in a chamber to try and compel action by a member. And, um, when the bill came out as Republican, super majority, I was a Republican legislator and, um, had a chairmanship at the time. And, um, I was heartbroken by Parkland and also did not feel like I could vote for the piece of legislation that came out because it would, in my pretty plain reading was a constitutional violation.
Like it would, there was some great stuff in there and some things I liked, but, but I was a no and had told leadership, um, who happened to be some, some really good friends and it, it alienated. At least one significant relationship in my life where that individual felt like, you're not my friend if you won't vote for this.
And it's like, it was tough. Um, but the whipping process there, uh, the, the office, the, the speaker's office was bringing house members that were a no vote in to meet the families and they didn't bring me in. And, um, I remember sitting on the floor and because I was in a chairmanship role, like I had a seat kind of in the middle, in the second or third row, wherever it was that year, and the Ryan Petty and Andy Pollock, uh, two of the, two of the dads were like, in eyesight to me.
And you're just counting down the days till this vote's coming and you know you're gonna vote no on this while these folks are up there. And the only reason they're here spending their time in Tallahassee is to, to say yes. And I remember I went to our, our comms director at the time in the, in the speaker's office and said, Hey, I want to, I want to meet with them and just explain to them why I'm gonna vote.
And he was like, you really don't have to do that. And I said, I just feel this compulsion that like my name's gonna show a red dot, and I wanna make really clear to them that I wanna work with them. I just can't say yes to this thing. Um, and it's an experience. That meeting didn't go well. Um, it did not go well.
And also true, both are good friends now. Um, and it was really interesting that like a third party was kind of meddling for a documentary angle, uh, that, that wasn't really related, but in the meeting and kind of stoking some things. Both are good friends. We've done a lot of good work now. Um, but you, you touched on two things, like you just kind of brought that memory back.
How would you say when that primary tertiary, secondary trauma, because we're setting the stage for the work you're doing that I, I, I'm really excited to talk about. I remember when I got told not too long ago, several years back, that like the ages zero to five is like the brain formation stuff, let's say That is like really foundational.
How accurate is that? Because I feel like not too long ago we were talking about zero to five is like these are the formative years and if you make it through that you'll be okay. And now we're getting to a place where it's like, man, there's stuff happening after five that is like, I feel like we used to say zero to five and the only trauma that mattered was capital T trauma.
Yeah. And it feels like we're in this moment where we're dispelling that. What feels like a myth? Am I crazy?
[00:34:28] Dr. Lisa Strohman: No, not at all. I think there's a lot of it. There's a lot of, I think, dissension in the psychology world of like whether or not we go back and we take these developmental milestones that are like Kohlberg and PJ and all of these things and like.
You know, our world's different now. We should just kind of throw those out and like rewrite those, uh, which I don't think is like necessarily the right response to it, but I do think that children are being influenced different than they were previously. And I think that that zero to five years of age where a child is actually, um, working on their attachment with another adult is where, you know, I look at some of the things where you have, um, in a crib now they have these devices where if a child cries, it triggers, uh, a mechanism on this computer that actually throws up onto their ceiling of a, like a collage of like flowers or bees or whatever it is.
And so it, it instantly takes the baby out of crying and it looks up and it's like, oh, 'cause it gets distracted and the light comes on and all the things, they stop crying. It slows down, it goes off. And so that's awesome. If you're a parent who just needs to sleep. But what you're doing for that child is you're saying you're gonna cry and ask for an interaction, an interpersonal response from the people that should be most important in your life, and they've just kind of outsourced it to this computer.
And so as a child, if you're starting and you look at the little mechanisms of all the little things, giving the child an iPad, whenever they're in a, in a restaurant so that they don't have to talk or any, you know, or they don't have to like be a bother to you, you're, you're outsourcing those experiences for that child in those very formative years of like being self-sooth and how to understand how to connect.
So I think it is really a formidable year there, but I think that they're all formidable. You know, the brain isn't done developing until 29, so I always tell people it's like, yes, those early years are very important. The elementary school years are. Super important, particularly when you look at the technology influence that's happening there.
And then middle school, where we're in this other stage where we're trying to learn who we are, um, that's super important. And then you get into high school and into college where it's like we're supposed to learn how to be vulnerable, trust others, and put ourself out on a limb so that we can fall in love for the first time.
That's not gonna happen if you look at all the other steps before that. So, um, the zero to five years of age I think is important in the sense that it's not the child as much as it is the parent that needs to understand your job is to create that security and that attachment so that child never questions.
'cause if a child grows up in that attachment phase where they have an insecure attachment or an ambivalent attachment attachment, that will impact how their marriage ends up in their forties.
[00:37:24] Jamie Grant: So, so, so, so, uh, quick anecdote. Uh, my sister is. The wisest woman I know. Um, my best friend, uh, we, and we were talking the other night and this topic came up, um, where so much and, and, uh, there's like that school of parenting that you'll either we grew up with or we have friends have seen it.
Um, never married, don't have kids. So like to me, I kind of try and look at this stuff like, okay, if I, if I have a family, like how would I attack it? Um, and I grew up very much in a household and around people. That was like, when the baby was crying, just let it cry because you don't wanna reinforce the attention.
And Jeanette and I were talking about this the other night. It's like, where is the right approach of like healthy attachment and security? And, and so I don't wanna take us down that trail 'cause we'll never get to your work. But that is a fascinating question I wanna talk to you about later. Uh, because like, I think there's a whole generation that grew up with that school of thought that like.
The, even if it's not the selfish mommy and daddy wanna sleep, it's just like, well, don't reinforce that. They can just cry and get attention. They need to learn to be tough. And I, we're starting, well, Cris are different. We're starting. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. I, so I don't wanna take a, that, that, gosh, that I get You make me so much smarter every time we talk.
Um, all right. So let's start turning the conversation towards how you're applying this with kids and what you're doing. And maybe starting at the psychology technology intersection. I know we've touched on it a little bit, um, but in one of our first conversations, I remember, I don't know if you remember this, but I remember saying to you, uh, I was talking about, uh, my nephew who is, uh, well, it's our youngest one.
Everybody knows Grant. Um, grant is super talented, but like, we watch Grant sometimes, uh, it's like there's two kids. There's Grant on his phone and Grant off his phone. Senior in high school, getting ready to go to Clemson. Gonna do great. Yeah. But I remember saying to you like, I had just moved to Greenville.
It was the first time in my life that I knew nobody, uh, other than a couple of people, and like this isolation was just bringing out behaviors in me that I was like grossed out by and trying to understand it. And, and you said Grace, gr Grace Gale, your phone. Uh, so that shortcut still exists. Um, but I remember, like I was talking about Grant and then you started talking about the work you're doing, and I was like, Hey, just to be clear, like I'm 42 and this is me too.
[00:39:53] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Mm-hmm.
[00:39:54] Jamie Grant: And I just remember in a couple of of minutes with practical kind of tactics, you were like, Hey, this, this, and this, that I still notice make a significant difference in my day or my week or our team when I'm doing. But, um, why don't you start kind of explaining a little bit the work you're doing, because you can't have these one-on-one conversations everywhere.
Lisa does not scale. If Lisa has to be involved in every conversation. Um, and so let's start talking a little bit about that piece, and then I wanna get to the AI piece after. 'cause I think you're, you're like so far ahead of your time, but also like it's coming right now and, and you're like right on time.
Uh, which I think is what's cool. So let's talk first about some of the, the work you've done with Digital Citizens Academy, um, and, and what problem you're trying to attack there.
[00:40:42] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Sure. Thanks. I, that really, it was like, as a psychologist, I actually have been practicing 22 years, so I've actually been in the space where I'm like, Hey, laptops completely screwed up, like marriages across the country.
You know, aol, why, why facing why, how? Because it's just 'cause we're not connecting. We're distracted, we're parallel playing. Like we're not really on, we're not actually spending time with one another. And instead of like having trust and interactions with the other person, we're actually like diving into our computers to find things, which makes the other person irrelevant.
So it it, you know, I saw that happen. Then I saw Facebook, you know, come in and it's like, oh, now we can like actually be friends with all the people that we knew in high school. And what about that boyfriend I had in seventh grade? And like, wow. He's like pretty, turned out pretty well. And um, like my husband's like over here, like, you know, running the landscaping business or whatever it is, you know, and so I saw a bunch of marriages falling apart and I was like, what is happening in our world that, you know, that the, the technology is to your point.
[00:41:42] Jamie Grant: Go ahead. Can I stop you for a second? Because Sure. All right. So, um, I think so, so one of the things I love that we've kind of refined is that Facebook normalized relationships with another human happening behind a screen. Yes. So it was, it was still a relationship, human to human, but it was behind a screen.
AI. It is going to normalize a relationship with a computer and behind a screen, right? Absolutely. So, so I think that is a fundamental truth in why I am like healthily obsessed with the work you're doing. But the other thing I would say that I think you just hit on is that Facebook, um, Facebook allowed the comparison prior to the relationship starting.
I would suggest that the dating app world is, is allowing the comparison before the relationship ever starts.
[00:42:39] Dr. Lisa Strohman: A hundred percent.
[00:42:40] Jamie Grant: And we're like scaling these things. It, it's like unhealthy over here. And it's like metastatic cancer over here because we went from normalizing relationships, peer to peer behind a screen where AI is doing it, peer to computer behind a screen.
And now we're actually having relationships as the interm intermediary for comparison prior to the relationship ever starting. And thinking we could ever have a healthy relationship if the relationship is starting with, well, let me keep swiping and see if there's something better than the digital pen pal I have today.
[00:43:13] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Right. And are we putting ourselves our authentic self forward, or are we putting together a curated, you know, trove of fixtures that we've like, edited and put out there in ways that make it seem like we're better than we are Yeah. In, in many ways. So how does that mess up with your psyche? For sure. Um, so I, I honestly saw it in adults first, uh, because of my work and, and where I was.
Uh, and then to your point, like I was like, okay, so then I started like seeing teenagers in my practice and then that brought me to kind of that bleeding edge of where social media was going to take us because I had kids telling me things and the apps that they were on. And so I literally was able to understand what the trends were.
Because of my work in the space. And so when you saw these, I mean, there was an app that came out yellow, which was literally Tinder for kids. And I was like, whoa, whoa, you know, we should probably like oversee what this is. And like you, they, they downplay everything and they allow, you know, kids age four plus you can download, um, apps that like you can change your whole appearance.
Uh, there's an app that's out right now that like you can notify people, anybody that you meet, you have to be nine to download that, you know? That sounds awesome. You know? So, um, you know, I saw like what those devices were bringing to them, not necessarily the technology itself. And I was like, I don't wanna be that person that's throwing technology out because what a grace and a gift it can be like to take a child that is in an inner city to the trails of Machu Picchu because that child will never probably be there.
Right? They're not gonna have that experience. But man, we can put, put 'em in a headset. We can show them the world. So that's amazing. So I just have been in, why, why I
[00:45:01] Jamie Grant: want dig on this. 'cause I, I'm obsessed with that topic. Uh, what I'll give the statement for you to Correct or I think we have an entire, and, and this struck me when I chaired criminal justice, uh, as a committee and it's like, all right, how do we really make a societal impact?
And what hit me, I only practiced law for like a year and a half, but we did some criminal defense work and I would have to go handle the, the docket some days. Um, and I just remember thinking there are defendants who have something to lose and there are defendants who have nothing to lose. And you could, you could literally like peg it.
Yeah. Watching the docket to like a hundred percent accuracy. Right. And I think the reason what you're saying is so important and I think what so many of us that are in positions to influence policy or who do have perspective and have experienced things, we fundamentally fail to understand that there are, there are like neighborhoods within a walk from where many of us live.
That have no idea the world is bigger and that there is something better out there. Is that why you think that's important, or is there more to it than that?
[00:46:07] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Absolutely. I, I think that what you, what what you just hit upon is that this myopic, um, like culturalism, right? Like that you're like, this is where I grew up and this is where I'm gonna be.
Like, I grew up and I was homeless. Like I was, like, my mom was on food stamps, I was in shelters. I was like bouncing off the couches. I shouldn't have left that world for all intents and purposes. But I knew because I had a grandmother and I had a librarian, and I had a teacher and I had these people, I didn't have the internet, but I had people that were like, Hey.
There are bigger things that you could do. And that's, I just started doing them. You know, I worked for hospice, I went and did family unity and worked with kids that were, you know, I was 17 working for kids that had been taken from by CPS. Like, I don't know what I was doing. You know, I look back and I'm like, you're a kid.
Like, I felt like I was 80. You know, I'm just like, yeah. You know, doing all of these things. But it was because I had stewardship, I had, I found my people that would take me there. And what I, what I think we can do with technology is that can come in and be a steward for good. We can use it for that. And we can take these kids out of these worlds where they're getting beaten down or they see that they're not gonna be able to, to outgrow, you know, the trailer park or the, wherever they are.
And they just like, feel like they can't, they're gonna fail down instead of like fail up. You know, run fast break things, it's okay, but like figure it out so that you actually have that. And that's what I think technology can do. Sorry,
[00:47:39] Jamie Grant: I, I, no, I, I, uh, it's a, it's a passion of mine because, um, 2016 I was still elected and I just, I was done.
Like, I felt like it was this inflection point and I don't want people to take this, uh, the wrong way or simplify it down to like a presidential election. Um, because like one of the challenges for me is like my philosophy and my theology are pretty public. Like, I can't, I can't like take this public persona and be like, I'm neutral.
I'm not neutral on philosophy and I'm not neutral on theology. But I would get really mad, um, at some of my fellow self-proclaimed conservatives. Who would take this? They should just pull themselves up by the bootstraps mentality. Because like I was born in what some, I mean everything's relative. Like I, I was born on what some people would call third base.
I had a dad. You know, you go back to like critical thinking. My dad, um, I, I always resented that he couldn't teach me how to hit a curve ball or throw a fly rod and things that I really wanted as a kid. But I remember cell phones were just a thing and I would be so excited my dad was coming home or he would call the house and I'd pick up and I'd say, Hey, where are you?
And he'd say, in the car. And I was like, where's the car? He's like, on the road. What road? The one that has stoplights on it. And at like five, he would make me like, walk through what question I had to ask to get to the answer I want to. And I would get so annoyed or my brother would cross examine me at dinner for his Christmas present.
And I think I was like 14 before I could finally give my brother a Christmas present. 'cause he knew how to cross examine better than anybody in the world. But now I realize like, man, they were giving me the greatest gift. And so not everybody has that. Like, not everybody grew up with what I grew up with and I don't think I was, I don't feel like I was born on third base, but relative to somebody else.
And like there's this mentality of, well, they just pull 'em up by their bootstraps and it just makes me, it like really pisses me off because I don't think we take the extra step to go like, where are these people? Like meet them where these people whate, whether we're talking about the criminal justice system or education, whatever group of people we're trying to talk about, like, let's step into their shoes for a second and understand like a lot of them have a desire to get outta that circumstance and they have no clue how, I think a lot of kids getting back to your work.
I think we're actually seeing kids like, wanna put the phone down and I'll, I'll make it per I, I am right now battling, there are times I'm working so hard. There are times that my phone is my break. I go sit in a barrel chair in the living room and I just start opening things and I feel powerless some days to put it down.
And I lose a collective two, three hours on a complete waste of time where I am in the moment going, this is stupid. And yet I feel like I can't stop. That's the power of, yeah. And I don't think I'm dumb. I don't think I'm dumb. I don't think I'm, but like if that's happening to me, who I think is pretty aware of these things now take like a 10-year-old kid in school who comes from a broken household, who doesn't have parents investing in them, who doesn't have a Ms.
Allison, and like what are we doing to support them? And I think that's why I'm in love so much with your work. Mm-hmm.
[00:51:08] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Yeah. Well to your point, like where you were in that litigation, in the docket, you could see like these, they have nothing to lose. They have everything to lose. Kinda, you could just see the difference.
Mm-hmm. I walk onto a school campus and I can immediately identify these kids have had social media for many years, these kids haven't, I can just see it, the hypersexualization, the, the blank stares, the lack of interest, the disrespect, like it is a fundamentally different child. And so I, I wish I could encapsulate that with like, some sort of lens and like, you know, put a documentary together because you can see the influence that it creates in these kids and how it changes them and how it impacts them.
But so what are you doing? What are
[00:51:51] Jamie Grant: you doing? 'cause I feel like I'm taking
[00:51:53] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Sure.
[00:51:53] Jamie Grant: Making this about me. I don't what are to going to Yeah. No, but which I love, right? Yeah. But I wanna make sure, because I think one of the important things we said, Lisa, doesn't scale. You've got this experiential, I think the blessing and the curse of people like us that have very different experiences applying a very different ways, um, the quick assessment, the ability to segment and like almost the battlefield medic, right, of like, mm-hmm.
This pa this, this soldier's gonna die no matter what happens. Give him a shot of morphine, put 'em in that corner, this chi, this soldier's gonna live no matter what you do. Give him a shot of morphine, put 'em in that corner. Hyperfocus on the ones that the decisions we make right now are gonna make the difference between this soldier living and dying.
So whether we're talking about it in the construct of a project for a state CIO or a governor, or we're putting it in the construct of a child and their trajectory with social media, very different applications. I think one of the, the blessings and the curse, like you have this amazing talent and amazing experience that you're applying for so much good, but like you can't go school by school, by school and do that all day, every day.
And then feel like knowing that it takes an investment, that it's not just give the answer. It's actually like train, equip and teach.
[00:53:13] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Right?
[00:53:13] Jamie Grant: So that can be a curse sometimes. I don't know if you feel this way, but like there are times I walk outta settings where I'm like, man, I really wish I could invest in mentor there, but I just don't have bandwidth.
Or man, I really wish I could take that project on, but I just don't have bandwidth. Um, I feel like you're saying the same thing. You walk into a school, you see the hypersexualization, you see the what? I would, I roll it all up into no identity, like a pursuit of identity. Um, and then you see it. So what are you doing and how are you working with school districts?
Because I maybe the other thing to set up your work, because I want, I want you to actually like get into the platform here. The other thing I'd say that I think is real. Is that we have really great teacher, we have Miss Allisons all over. We have some great teachers and I think they're experiencing the same frustration, but they don't know what to, they, they didn't get training and education in this space.
They got training in education in how to teach, hopefully, but they probably feel powerless. Like, man, I, I've got these kids. I don't know how to, so what are, what, how are you applying both the concept of scale and tactics and teaching and training, both for the student, but also to support a district and administrator, a principal and a teacher in the classroom?
[00:54:25] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Yeah. Uh, good question. Uh, so what we did was create it in like a tech platform. We had to, uh, eventually we had in order to scale to get it. But what I look at it is, it's gotta be holistic. So we've got the K through 12 programming for the kids. We've got the professional development education piece for educators and administrators.
That really touch upon all of this content so that they actually know why is what's happening with kids and what to go into. And then we have the parent piece and that tripod has to exist because if we go in for the parents and the educators and we train the adults, then we're not empowering the kids.
And my motto is we educate, first we train them to be the trainers, right? We teach the kids how to be, um, the leaders in the space, and then we actually empower them to go out and make effective change. Because to me, that's so important. So we have the, the K through 12 lessons that the kids go through that have a bunch of like ancillary stuff that is like essentially all online that teachers can use.
They can send it home, they can have the families go through it. Then we have a peer to peer mentoring program, which I'm super stoked about because that one is like. We're giving them actually rank and we're giving them qualifications and like not only are they being mentored and getting points for that, they're mentoring others.
So that train the trainer model, I'm putting into the kids' hands and it is amazing what happens because, and I started that. I mean, Jamie, like I've been in front of schools and I will say hand to God, I have asked every single group that I've been in front of, how many of you have younger siblings? They will all raise their hand.
I will say, keep your hands up. How many of you that have your hands up want your younger sibling to have be on social media and hand to God? A hundred percent of the time those hands have gone down. So I was like, how do I capture that? How do I make them the leaders? How do I empower them to be the voice?
Because I've basically come in, I was like, here's the rules. Here's what the tech industry is doing. You are not using their product. They've made you their product and here's what you can do to have voice in this space. So that is really successful, that piece of it. And then I really, uh, you know, look at how do I get parents involved and how do I create scale me.
So creating this massive like language model that's closed model does not go out to the whole internet. It is only the books that I've written, my TED talks, all of the information that I have from my internet crimes unit detectives and teachers. And I've put together thousands of like q and a questions for that to be an AI model, like an assistant to me, where if parents have a question or kids have a question, they can go in and if they ask a question that's not in there, it basically says, that was a really thoughtful question, thank you for giving it to us.
We're gonna get back to you on that because it's important that you get an actual expert response. So I'm not just gonna make it up and like have some sort of like computer creative for them. I want them to actually have access to it. And that to me is scalable, excited about that.
[00:57:24] Jamie Grant: You should be, and the world should be, um.
I think, uh, and, and this is where sometimes my theology, uh, kinda foundation of everything, but like, I, I, I, I think social media is warfare like, uh, in, in the sense of like, we battle it and there are certain battles that I just don't think we can win until we recognize we're in a battle. And until we start to go like, wait a minute, I, I can't overcome what the tech industry has, like tech industry against me.
And I think there's this, uh, I wonder if you agree with this. Uh, I get very, um, when we talk about first order principles, second order, third order, uh, uh, effects. I also think, uh, like I think that's one truth of like the inertia happening from first order principal down to the third and fourth order effects.
Then I think there's also a truth of tensions and it hit me as you were talking, where the same parent that by the time their kid is in middle school now. Don't get me started on travel ball. Um, that I could go off. Like I love, uh, not just because I grew up in the south, which means, uh, we are all Braves fans growing up at, at that age.
But, but Chipper Jones has been very vocal. Jeff Frank, who are, some of these guys have been very vocal. Like, my kids are gonna play all the sports. We're not doing travel ball 365, like, we're gonna have well-rounded kids. And I think it takes a hall of famer to go to all these dads that are trying to live vicariously through their kids, making 'em play travel ball year round.
The same dad, and I'll pick on dads here, the same dad that wants their kid and maybe it's mom and cheer and like, there's parallels, but the same parent that by the time their kid's in like middle school is like, you're gonna be the best kid on the team. You're gonna have the best grades, you're gonna go to the best college.
Like now all of a sudden they're invested. In their kids' outcomes. Or maybe the same parent that was letting the child cry and not develop attunement or attachment or whatever the right word is, is the same parent that when mom and dad and the family went to dinner, said, Hey, quit asking us questions.
Here's the iPad. Shut up and get lost in the screen. And there's this tension right between the kid who wants to have social media for themselves, experiences that warfare or that battle. And simultaneous is like, I don't want my, my younger sibling to go through this. And it feels like what you're circling around is several truths.
Most people don't want the answer. They want to be trained, they wanna be equipped, like they don't actually just want to be told by somebody older Don't do what? Don't make the mistake I made. Or Here's how to do it. Right. They actually want to be mentored, guided, empathized with, I'm gonna, I'm gonna call out again 'cause I love him.
But we're in a season with Grant, like he's getting ready to go to college and he and I get to have some really special conversations, but he simultaneously wants to be very successful professionally, has all the talent to do it, and won't get off Snapchat because I don't, he, his argument is, well, that's just where I find out what's everything's going on.
Like that's, that's where like we, we have to have it to know like, you know, where everybody's going and what's happening and all that. And there's this tension, right? Because if he really wants to excel professionally, he'll start taking the discipline and the habits now to go like this, thing's killing me.
And what I tried to, we were actually talking about this last Sunday. I was like, man, as you go to college, like if there's one thing that I could impart in you because I battle this every day, is understand that like, college is really the first time where you get to really truly get left on an island to build the habits and discipline that will follow you for the first, for, for your career.
So like. Schedule classes at 10:00 AM sleep till 9:00 AM that habit gonna kick your butt when you get into the real world. You can survive college that way, but it feels like you're circling around both those truths. There's always tension in stuff, and also we really want to be trained and equipped. Um, so I look forward to, like I got a question for you.
I'm gonna put you on the spot. Yeah. Would you do like a, we, if, if we, if we were, because the episode before you, and this will, uh, the episode before you is a guy named Rajiv Bajaj and they do some awesome work in the K 12 space. That's the non-profit stuff we've talked about the AI convening that I think goes to whether your work, but like, do you ever do webinars with interested folks in K 12 going like, we've got this systemic problem in our district, in our school, in our classroom, and we don't even know where to begin because I feel like you have this tool, I'll call it a tool or set of tools that like, makes an impact now.
That, that like the world just doesn't know exists?
[01:02:18] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Uh, great question. I've done it over the years. Uh, I partnered with a company called Gaggle for a number of years, so I did like at least one a month and like would, and that would go, uh, entirely to like K through 12 space. And now we're launching, um, a webinar series, the Ask Lisa like webinar podcast kind of that we're gonna take from these school districts and answer it.
Um, the, the, the superintendent meeting that I just came from, they're like, could you do two a month so that we can get more questions answered? Um, so I'm kind of like looking in that space, but I'm building out like my whole, my like actually like a recording room so that I can just start doing them so that I can actually give them that answer.
Because to your point. It is like water through a fire hose right now with the AI space, and particularly Trump's mandate, uh, the executive order that came out and he's like, Hey, in 90 days I want every school and every child to have like AI training. And so I was like, huh. Like, thank god I had like, looked in 2017 is when the CCP or the Chinese Communist Party had like actually said, we're going to have, uh, all of our kids trained by 2025.
So I started back then and I was like, all right, we need to have a curriculum. We need to have like, professional development. And everybody was like, no, no, we're not gonna do AI in school. Like, we're not gonna let the kids use it. They're gonna cheat. And I'm like, okay. So I'm silently over here creating my content because I'm like, you're not gonna be able to do that for long.
Like, that's not how the world's working so
[01:03:44] Jamie Grant: well. So, all right. So let's let segue to the ai Yeah. I would love to segment to the ai, but I wanna make sure we draw this connection.
[01:03:51] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Yeah.
[01:03:53] Jamie Grant: Uh, if we kind of, um, if we thought about the, the first set of tool solutions you've built, it's. Uh, I don't wanna overly simplify it, but to, to boil it down, it is, uh, the impact of social media and phone addiction in the educational environment and the family.
Like, how, how would you, 'cause I, because I want to, I want to draw the.in a second to ai, how would you distill down that first set of tools we talked about? 'cause you're, you're like attacking so many things, but you're also doing it in a way that's like a system. What is that first thing you went after if you were to put that into a sentence?
[01:04:33] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Creating kind, empathetic. Digital citizens, right? Like I knew from the beginning, like kids, to your point, like you can do things behind a screen, inside of a car. You can scream at someone or yell at them the same way these kids are using their devices as if it's anonymous, like an anonymous like post or things like that that they, they, they can get away with.
So I would say generally it is how do we get kids to understand the power of their voice and how it's amplified through these devices? And how do we give them training on what bullying is, what harassment is, what inappropriate posting is, what Sextortion is. Like how do I, how do I communicate without terrifying them that there are over 200 million, uh, or no two.
But what the, I used to say there's like 1.8 million predators online every day. And David Irv, who's a whistleblower at Meta, um, basically said Lisa, he's like, your numbers are off. He's like, you're talking about the convicted predators. He's like, there's a hundred to 200 million every day that are on there looking at your kids and trying to get to them, and they know exactly where to go.
And I was like, holy cow. Like, I didn't even know how many kids were being targeted at that point. And he was like, no, we've, we have probably a hundred to 200 million cases every day that come through. Like, that's terrifying. Which
[01:05:56] Jamie Grant: represent? Which represents, like if we, if we made it relative, you're talking 20 to, uh, 45% of the American population.
And I know you're saying globally we're not. Mm-hmm. But I'm saying globally, to put that at scale, like a hundred to 200 million people would make you like the, it's gotta be like the fifth largest country in the world by population. Probably. Like if, I mean like, that is a massive number.
[01:06:21] Dr. Lisa Strohman: I mean he, he essentially, particularly now with like the 7, 6, 4 micro cells and the fact that you have like these like, um, outsource, it's so interesting.
If you haven't seen, um, traffic. Uh, which is like a series it's on. But I was looking at the one that, you know, they basically, the UK and us went over and we like hired these like very poor, uh, countries to like go and be like our call centers. And they learned very quickly how to communicate with Americans specifically.
And so it made them very good at how to create vulnerable populations in that. And I was like watching that system and I was like, so David said to me, he's like, you know, there's 10 to 20 million online predators at a given time and you have a hundred to 200 million kids being impacted. And I thought, wow.
Like, where are those numbers coming from? And then I watched the series on traffic and I was like, it, it would be really easy if you're actually training people on how to traffic.
[01:07:17] Jamie Grant: Yep.
[01:07:17] Dr. Lisa Strohman: So, um, and that's what we're doing, you know, so I don't try to terrify people with all of the details of like the bad and the evil out there because I feel like that's the part that I need to protect them from.
But what I want them to know is I want them to be. Thoughtful critical thinkers when they're online understanding reality. How do you discern something that's real and not real? How do you figure out whether or not somebody's lying or, or if it's a real person on the other end? Like, we've gotta teach them.
We can't just hand it to 'em, not train them.
[01:07:48] Jamie Grant: And I think, uh, one of my favorite quotes is by a, a, a guy that's now passed away, Tim Keller, who was just a super gifted pastor. But, um, truth without love is harsh. And love without truth is mere sentimentality. And I think to your point, I think the least loving thing we can do is hide the truth.
[01:08:08] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Mm-hmm.
[01:08:09] Jamie Grant: So like, we have to be willing to give the truth, and I don't care what kind of context this is in at like the global scale you're working or just our individual relationships and our families and friends and work like the, the lying is the most mean thing that exists.
[01:08:26] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Mm-hmm.
[01:08:27] Jamie Grant: Now that said, like giving people the truth.
Is also kind of harsh if we don't do it in love or in, and I think the case you're going like, where maybe we don't have a solution. Right? So I think it's cruelest to lie to families and kids that you're not in a battle. 'cause we are. Mm-hmm. Yes. Like there are, there are predators everywhere. They are using tools that could otherwise be used for good and these people are seeking to harm you.
You better understand you're on that battlefield, not by your choice. Like war is a one party decision sometimes.
[01:09:02] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Mm-hmm.
[01:09:03] Jamie Grant: Right? I, I get brought into a war 'cause somebody declared war. Um, and so I, I don't think there's anything to encourage you, I don't think there's anything, and I know you know this, but like to, to, to hopefully just encourage you, like there's nothing negative about speaking the truth about what's out there.
I think what I love so much about your work is that you're actually digging deep into the truth about what's out there, what's beneath it. And then here's how to solve it. So if we segment now to the AI piece where I'm fascinated and you just, you just referenced the, the, the president's executive order on ai.
I'm gonna set this up this way. Uh, I would often talk, uh, uh, in keynotes about the difference between capitalism and capitalism like the A and the, the O, right? And this will go back to your legislative days. Um, capitalism is where people use government regulation to their advantage, their protection to actually mitigate competition, right?
They have the influence to be at the table and they go, Hey, there's an opportunity. Let's seize it. Or let's prevent somebody else from having the opportunity. Capitalism that's become kind of divisive in some circles is nothing more than free markets getting to work in a meritocracy. Um, I think when we see executive orders like this, somebody says, oh, AI executive order, opportunity to train, and they're not making the connection that you make, that AI is this extension or acceleration.
Of your underlying work, like I think your work on AI is so powerful in general, but more so because it's built upon the foundational s stuff that we've been talking about to date. So if you were to introduce your work in the AI front and now understanding that there is a regulatory kind of demand for a solution.
So many people, you, you, you said this so well, Lisa, when GPT started academia, parents, students all looked at it as a shortcut for work, whether good or bad, the student said, Hey, I can be way more efficient. The teacher said, Hey, plagiarism's gonna happen. But people were looking at it all wrong in, in my opinion, and I think yours as just like a productivity thing without understanding the psychological or sociological or contextual parts of it.
That are so much bigger than that. Mm-hmm. So how would you introduce, let's start without the executive order, and let's just say that if, if you were writing the prescription in this space and the work you're doing and what you were seeing coming, how would you introduce that?
[01:11:40] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Yeah, I think what I see and what is happening is that we aren't understanding that.
I mean, AI has been around for, for over a decade. You know, we've been using it all the long and people haven't known it. So anytime that you're basically going onto a website and like a little chat bot caps up and says, Hey, can I help you with something in your cart? Or things like that, that's all ai, you know, so we've had it for a really long time.
The part of that's changed is like putting it to the consumer and selling it that the way that they did, which is you can be more productive, as you said, or you can get these things done. And most people are using it still, probably a little bit like Google, like they're not really sure of the power of what they can do with it.
What I think that I see is if we continue to use it and um, and we are outsourcing, for instance, like I've got a CEO and he's like, this is so great. Like I've got a bot that does my HR and I've got a bot that does this and I've got that. He's like, I've let three people go. He's like, my company's more efficient.
Like I'm gonna sell and dah, dah, dah. And so I look at it and I was like, alright, so you were like this family run business. You've let three of the people go that have been with you over a decade building this company with you because you have this efficiency. And instead of like actually figuring out how do you get it further, how do you move that?
Right now you're at the space where you're actually like getting rid of people that are imperative to your company. And, and, and so that's like the psychological, that's the contextual, that's the part where it's like, all right, so this tool can kind of cut corners for you, but what is that company gonna come in and buy from you?
Now they can't buy your chat bot, right? They can't buy, they can't buy like the value of what that team was there did. So I, you know, I think that we're jumping a little bit too quickly ahead of things. And the same thing with kids. If kids are in school and they're starting to use AI without understanding what the prompt is giving them, without being able to discern and fact check and be able to understand from their own critical thinking of what they wanna say, and they're just like cutting and pacing and moving, they're not going to be able to, in the end, graduate and be able to go into the workforce and be productive citizens.
[01:13:58] Jamie Grant: I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a bold claim here. I think you and I with our respective backgrounds could. I prompt most people at Big Tech, and the reason I say it is mm-hmm. What made, what made prompting very natural for me, like the connection was, I, I always tell people that getting a law degree is actually an engineering degree.
It's just an engineering degree in the English language.
[01:14:27] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Mm-hmm.
[01:14:28] Jamie Grant: And what made prompting very natural for me was it was like, it, like to me, uh, the GPT was a witness on the stand that I was either trying to elicit a story from or interrogate for the right answers. But it, it requires a heavy degree of critical thinking, which I think goes, goes full circle back.
It it, what I just heard you saying, and before I sound arrogant, I don't mean that to say we're great prompters we're awesome. I mean, to say it like, if you don't have the critical thinking piece, like I, I love where you went with that at the top because I think. Like civilization demands critical thinking to survive.
I would actually argue that if, if we played the, you know, the, the Vogue game of why the Roman Empire fell or any other great civilization, it is true to say that the, the state got so big, the person got so small. All the, but like that's really just rooted in critical thinking. Like it was really just a, a stack of bad decisions that didn't say, what does history tell us about this decision in front of us?
'cause it's gonna repeat. Or if we do this, then what happens? Or where's the tension? And I think what you're, what you're doing is, is helping educate people on the difference between using AI as a shortcut to the answer. Because if that's the case, then sure, I can downsize my organization, I can leverage tools like Zapier or make and automate all sorts of different things.
And yes, we can get more efficient. And so now my choice is, well if I replaced. The function. I think, you know what, I think that CEO you're describing not to, like, let's just say he's hypothetical. Mm-hmm. I think your, that that example of a CEO is, um, the, the other side of the coin where some employees think that AI is coming for their job.
That is not true. AI is coming for their job description, but it is not coming for their job. A CEO who thinks that AI is a way to displace people, fundamentally misses that AI is not a replacement for the job. It is a way to augment the job description and to scale the benefit to more customers.
[01:16:44] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Correct.
Well said. Okay. And, and that's the part that I think that we're, we're missing. And I, and I'll, uh, just an anecdotal story. Um, I, I worked with a, a medical, a CMO, um, that had left the medical field and he's like, you know, I'm gonna go into insurance. I'm gonna take this big job and I'm gonna like. Really clean it up like it's a mess over there.
And he really, I think idealistically, you know, 10 years ago thought that he could go and do that. And I went on his podcast and I had this conversation with him and it was a frustration of a medical thing that I had gone through. And I was like, listen, um, and I, you know, I'm a fighter, you know, so I didn't take the insurance denied claims.
Well, and I like threw them in front of like CNN and Fox News. I was like, Hey, this is what they're doing to people, you know? And so I got his attention, we had this great conversation and I thought it was amazing to have that conversation. Not everybody would be that, that lucky or that have that opportunity to do that.
And what he told me was, he's like, well, he's like, you know, once I got there and I realized that if I really did create the efficiencies that I could, and remind you, this is like 10 years ago when he went over there when he could have, when it wasn't about ai, but he said, you know, there's a lot of people that lose their jobs and that impact society.
And if society doesn't have jobs, then it hits onto like. The numbers that we look at on, you know, political parties and, you know, and I just thought, just stop. Like, where, where does it end? Like how far upstream do we have to go to be like, Hey, you've got bloat in your organization and you have 20 year olds denying claims for people who have cancer and things like that.
Like, you have to change that. He's like, well, you know, they need some sort of jobs, you know, and I just, it, it, it was disheartening. And that's where I see some of the AI decision making in leadership, where they're like, it's just like a quick grab to like, go out there and they're, they're not thinking through in the opposite way, you know?
Like this guy was like, we're gonna keep everybody because like, like societally, we can't like, handle losing hundreds of thousands of jobs in this organization. But that's what he just said to me when he said it. We had hundreds of thousands of jobs that he could have eliminated that he, that weren't needed.
[01:18:54] Jamie Grant: So I, you know what's funny is I like on, on our episodes to. Throw a statement out and get an agree or disagree. Nobody makes me more nervous to do it than you. Um, oh gosh. Because I'm like so far outta my league here. Um, when you were just talking about that, Lisa, something hit me that I'd love your take on.
I think who really should be scared of ai and I think, let me say this first. I think that your work on the digital citizen and on the AI front is, and I honestly like this is not hyperbole and I do get fairly accused of being hyperbolic from time to time, and sometimes I'm intentionally hyperbolic this, I mean with like the most stone cold seriousness, I think the work you're doing is fundamentally critical for the republic's survival.
Because I think we're at this inflection point where there is a force or forces or powers that are so powerful that if the individual, citizen, individual family unit doesn't understand what's happening, we have no hope. Like it will be this tidal wave that'll take us over. Now, assuming we can amplify your work and we can help you scale, and we can help you do the work you're doing inside that community, I know you're, you're very gracious to say, Hey, I'm not the only one, but like, this is the way I'm doing it.
But like, if we can help amplify the good work and the healthy work that you're equipping, then I think who should be fundamentally terrified of AI is the grifters.
[01:20:41] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Mm-hmm.
[01:20:41] Jamie Grant: And kind of the oligarchy. Because never before has the individual citizen had more access and speed to keep up with what used to take a ton of money and access.
Like what AI I think empowers in the good way is people who know the right questions to pursue truth, to create transparency that finally starts to chip away at a lot of the, uh, the, the plague of kind of this corporate oligarchical mentality that's like, we can't do that. We have too many people and then we can't sponsor this golf tournament, and then we can't go on this president's club trip and then we can't do all this.
None of which actually benefits the patient, the student, the consumer. Um, so that's another rant. You just get my brain going and I, it, it, sorry. Do you agree? I do agree. I could honestly talk these days. Hundred percent. Do you agree that, that like, that's the tension of like. If, if we don't get this foundational work done, like if we don't do this foundational equipping of the family unit and the citizen, the student, the child, the parent, that like the America is screwed because we cannot possibly overcome this.
But if we do get it right, we can make more progress then maybe we've made in the history of this country.
[01:22:03] Dr. Lisa Strohman: I agree. And I think that the curve and where I see AI is that the, the understanding of how it works, right? And if you understand that, if you ask even a, a critically thought out prompt, it's going out and taking context out of the entirety of the internet.
And so in that world of what it's scraping that data from has people that are, have evil intent. There are people that are anti-Semitic, there are people out there that have websites on eating disorders and drug dealers and. Traffickers and all of that stuff. So you have to keep in mind, and this is why I, for my AI model, it's like it will be a closed model.
It will not go out to the world. It will only be contextual educational information in there that I like approve, because I want it to be authentically empathic, authentic, and have an expertise that people can trust. And
[01:23:00] Jamie Grant: so if, can I ask you a follow up real quick before Sure. Because I want you to get to the, because when you use the term close model there, I wanna make sure I'm tracking the difference between open and close.
Because I think there's two meanings this could take. One is open as far as what it ingests, right? Correct. Like open model is like people can add to my model, the other is closed as in accessing your model.
[01:23:28] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Uh, when I'm using it, and it's probably not the right terminology. You're fine. I just wanna make sure I'm tracking
[01:23:34] Jamie Grant: to, to.
[01:23:35] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Yeah. So, um, the hardest part of having a company that's a tech-based company that's educating people on technology is not understanding the technology yourself as A CEO. So, um, what I mean by that is, and I think that they call it a rag model, but that the repository of information, assuming that's closed, it's my house that is closed.
Yep. I will not be going outside of that. And that I will basically become a curator of all things that I find is important. And, and let me give you the example. I can go on to a, um, we had Lexi Nexus in law school mm-hmm. That, that has all the access to all of the, the books that we needed when we were in law school.
There's repositories for journals and all of the things, well. We have now in a society, people publishing things in journals, whether it's through LexiNexis or that a lot of people use Google Scholar. Uh, if you're in a university you can access like real journals that are actually being published. But I had a conversation on a podcast with someone who runs a journal and she said the content that's coming in isn't actually written by a human.
Like we're having submissions on like, we did this, this, this experiment and here's our results and it's 80% ai. And she said to me, she said it, it has become my quest now for her to go out and look. So I, as a scientist at heart, I look at the numbers so I can have, I mean, I had a, I had a 30-year-old in here the other day and he is like, I don't know what you're gonna say about this, but here's a study on why weed is healthy.
And I don't know why, like, you think it's like causing brain issues and kids. I was like, well, let me see your study. It was sponsored by the weed industry. It had an n of or a number of people in the study of 18. And I was like, there's no power behind your study. Let me explain to you what research methods is and let me just give, you know, a reality check on this.
Right. Um, and again, like that's, I mean, it's not my platform against, but like 99% THC without CBD, when our body has cannaboid receptors, like it doesn't work. Like kids are getting like schizophrenia and like all of these things and anyway, so it's just like a side platform for me. But that's my point of like having a rag model, I think is what they call it.
Which, where the repository is closed and curated by Right. An expert Yep. Is we're not gonna put data in there that's getting fed out to the people that are, are using it. That is not an expert quality and, and. Which I think is basically vetted, which is, I, I just wanted to make
[01:26:08] Jamie Grant: the distinction because some, so you're then opening the model both in the platforms you're doing, and I don't wanna speak for you at some point.
Yeah. You could open that rag model where other models have the ability to query it, but not to contribute to that underlying correct foundation. Right? Yep. Yeah. Okay. So let's wrap here before we get into what we call the roundup, where people get to really get a little insight to Lisa of the person. Um, tell me about the executive order, the need to act on this stuff, um, because you referenced it, but I wanna make sure, um, we leave the audience with kind of tactical ways to consume.
If they're in a space that now they find this regulation, what is the regulation requiring and what are you doing to help people comply with? And more importantly, not just comply with change lives, build outcomes.
[01:27:02] Dr. Lisa Strohman: So what the executive order, I'm just gonna like high level it is we want every student and to, in the society to have training in AI starting fall of 2025.
So literally this month, next month, um, when schools are going back into session, they are to be trained in that. When I look at that, it also wants the workforce to be trained. So there's also, um, kind of corporate and governmental roles and all of that. So what I'll simply, what I did and what I had already built was, uh, a training module.
So like, I have a professional development for either government or education. Like, here's what AI is, here's the upper levels of it. This is how it works, this is what you should know about it. This is what you should appreciate. This is what you should fear, this is what, you know, understanding that there's a continuum of ai.
And I think most people are, are fearful of the, the end of it where it becomes autonomous and it's making decisions without us. Like we should all be terrified of that. But AI generally is not. Autonomous, it is generally what we're feeding to it. So it's just teaching people about what AI is and like also how do we now use it appropriately and how do we train it appropriately.
And then the K through 12 AI modules that we're, that we've created is basically taking kids in a scaffold approach, just like all education does and we build upon it. So when they're little, it's very, um, simplistic, but again, giving them the understanding and the healthy respect of what it can do and what it is and what it isn't.
Because I think that to your point, and when you encouraged me earlier, to be honest, the part that I worry about is I don't wanna overwhelm people with like, here's what, how it can be really super dangerous. I want to really give that picture of like, tech is a tool is awesome, tech is a toy, not so much.
So let's kind of look at what the good and the bad of it is. So that's what we're doing with AI is we built it into the DCA program. Uh, and then we've just created trainings so that everybody's can be. Compliant, uh, within the first semester, um, and, you know, jump on webinars and do the trainings and do all of the things.
That's what we're doing.
[01:29:09] Jamie Grant: So I wanna make sure you, we wanna make sure we do it right, but we'll put in the show notes where people can find you and that, uh, to make sure, um, that if they're, they're trying to get there. I think if I were to sum up so much of your work, um, one of my, I forget where I heard this, but, um, nothing is good or bad until it's made relative or until we understand like how it's being used, right?
Mm-hmm. Um, and it's really easy for us to look at a drug, a gun, like go down the, a hammer, like all of these tools. Some people describe 'em as a weapon and maybe they're applied as a weapon, but like all of these tools have power for good or bad. This is not a new, I think what, what if I were to sum up the conversation with you that, that I feel like sums.
All of our conversations is that like you are getting really deep on what is this thing? Where's the psychology behind it? Where's the history behind it? 'cause AI really isn't anything new. It's a, it's just a new application of timeless sociological and psycho psychological and experiential principles that have existed with different applications.
Now we just have this like super powerful application and it would be really easy to get lost in the sex appeal of that powerful application and not just kind of strip it down to the fundamentals and, and kind of ask the why and what's behind that and how do we make sure that in every situation possible, it's applied for good, good of the family, good of the individual, good of the republic.
Um, so I just, I love the work you're doing. Aw,
[01:30:43] Dr. Lisa Strohman: thanks. Yeah. I think that you well said. And, and one of the things you said, like as a tool and, and for me, like I used to talk about this years ago, but I would say like if I walked into a house as, as a. As a parent and there was unfettered internet access on one table and then there was a gun on a second table.
I would say I would be more terrified of my child having access to the unfettered internet than I would the gun. Like children naturally understand that that is something to be cautious about or they understand that it's, but it's, it's a, it's a one and done. You know, it might have six chambers or whatever it has, but it's not, it's not something that will curate and explore their life and shift who they are as a human, the way an unfettered access to internet is.
And so that's what, that's what drove me into this,
[01:31:36] Jamie Grant: I think. I think that's awesome. I think there's so many things we could pull off of that. Like even when used for bad, the, the harm of the gun is so much smaller, right? Like it doesn't provide global scale at once. It doesn't have anonymous. Impact it doesn't have.
And there is some recognition of like, okay, that's powerful. So even if we have somebody that picks it up and uses it for bad, it's starting with the construct of I can do harm with this. And I think, uh, gosh, I love that. Take so much, Lisa, because I do think we have so many people that don't understand the harm of, they don't understand the power and the harm that can be done with something that seems innocent, innocuous, or just a dopamine hit.
Yep. Alright, so we're gonna, we we're gonna make sure we get you outta here on time 'cause you have, uh, way more important things than talking to this bozo. Um, love talking to you. So we love doing this thing at, we call it the roundup, kind of a un uh, unscripted, uh, a lot of 'em, kind of the same questions, but just a chance for people to get to know you and also maybe to get some stuff outside your work.
So I, if you had one piece of advice that shaped your career, and I think this might be hard for you because you've had so many. But if you had one piece of advice, one thing that you feel like is a truth that has really shaped your career, what is it and who do you, who or what do you give the credit to?
[01:33:02] Dr. Lisa Strohman: I would say what I start every day with and end every day with. I call it my can, my, uh, end points beginning and end points of my day. Uh, is, did you leave the world a little better than you found it this morning? So every morning I kind of do this little meditation and I think through kind of my intentions without my phone, you know, just kind of sit through, think through the people in my life.
And at the end of the day, my question is always, did you leave the world a little better today? And it could be like yesterday, there's a woman having trouble like. Pumping her gas. And you know, I, you know, I went up and I was like, it seems like you're having trouble. And you know, this like 80-year-old woman like cursing at the station.
And she's like, you know, anyway, like, so yesterday was really easy for me. I was like, I did, you know, like I made her day way better by like just helping her with at the pump. But I think that, and, and I would, I would say that that was my grandmother. My grandmother taught me the golden rule and my grandmother was, uh, the person who on very difficult days, and I could give you a thousand stories that, that I can bring up with her.
Um, but that was the one piece of advice. And I tell people, I was like, if you just look at your life and you, and you know that you have to be accountable at the end of the day to something like that, then it, it just drives you during your, during your waking hours.
[01:34:18] Jamie Grant: I love it. Um, this next one I sometimes pull, but there's no chance I'm pulling it with you.
[01:34:24] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Hmm.
[01:34:24] Jamie Grant: Um, because you already gave me one, so the, the gray scale is not allowed, but we, I do want you to touch on it. You gotta gimme another one.
[01:34:32] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Mm-hmm. What
[01:34:32] Jamie Grant: is your secret weapon for productivity? Like for yourself or for somebody else? If you said like, Hey, I need to give somebody a practice that really helps them lock in.
I am a living testament and a complete hypocrite that cannot dis, I cannot obey your advice enough on this, but like, my life is so much better when my phone is gray scaled. It is infinitely less interesting at gray scale. Um, and we may even in the show notes link to how folks, uh, the one thing I did do, by the way, there's a shortcut.
'cause I noticed, here's where I got in trouble. I noticed that there were certain things I needed color for. If I was doing some design work or I was editing a picture, whatever it was, it's like that I can't do in gray scale. And now I have to like, um, and do that. The shortcut is both good for productivity, but then it's really easy for me to toggle back and forth.
Uh, between grayscale and cover color, but what's the, what's another productivity hack for yourself or that you give to patients or friends that you would say, here's a way to help you lock in?
[01:35:33] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Uh, I'll give you two because I think they're both equally important. One is disconnect your computer device from your com, from, from mirroring your phone.
So the fact that if you're on your computer and messages are coming through and you're seeing all of the things that your phone has on it, you a hundred percent are not gonna be locked into whatever you're doing on that computer. So that to me, particularly with younger kids, like they think it's like, oh, I can go to school and I can pretend to be on my computer, and I'm like messaging my friends.
Um. So disconnect that, like make sure that those aren't connected. That's like really from a productivity standpoint, I think it's really, really important. Um, and then for me, like I actually, um, ironically, uh, don't use my phone unless I have to for patient. You know, I don't use it at like, it's this thousand dollars unit that I carry around that I use to like schedule patients, but when I have it, I, I give myself a timer.
So I think it's really important and, and I don't participate in social media because I like, just know like the bad of it. I, I know I do have social media platforms, but I, I don't go in personally and use it. I use it for business. Um, but I actually, um, for me, I think like putting those timers on, I tell everybody that.
And, um, my daughter who played soccer, I had like all the soccer moms and, and the dads are like, oh my God, you gave me my wife back. Because like you put timers on it and it actually. Brings you back to your real life more often than not. So you can do that however old you are. And I think it's important to do
[01:37:07] Jamie Grant: for follow up later 'cause I did that and it doesn't work for me and I wanna know why I think I'm in a worse, like I get the notification like, you've hit your time limit for the day and then I'm just like, ignore for today.
Uh, the one that I've loved, by the way, the one that has been great is the brick device. I think we talked about that. Oh yeah. Uh, before, I love the brick, huge ambassador of the brick. Um, have one at home. My challenge on days that I work from the house, I keep it on the fridge, which makes me have to go walk and tap my phone.
And sometimes I'm such a degenerate that I'm like, I'll go tap my phone. But at least that walk like is a check. Um, I'm not doing a good enough job. I bought one for the road. I've actually started thinking I gotta get it right. I've run into some problems where like on road trips I've bricked on the way out.
And then there's something that I needed that I didn't have whitelisted for, like real work, uh, and got in trouble. But I love the brick device. Uh, that has actually worked for me. I'm not saying the timers don't work. I, that's why I think it's like, if I were to describe you and your work in one word, it's in intentional.
Like there is an intentionality behind everything you do. And I think that's one of the things I appreciate you, uh, about you most. Um, now to segue from intentionality.
[01:38:21] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Mm-hmm. What
[01:38:21] Jamie Grant: do you do to unplug? Because I'm a big fan of Sabbath and sabbatical and like rest and like we all need it. And you are highly functioning.
You are really, um, highly functioning, super hardworking. What is it that you do to just like unplug an activity a thing, and meditation doesn't count for this because I think that's like a, like what is the enjoyment? The rest, the, okay, this is where my brain just shuts off. If Lisa's gonna do that.
[01:38:50] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Me like music and hiking or walking.
Um, uh, my daughters asked me to start running with her again, and I was like, Hmm. I think my body's a little too old for running after a couple of times. Um, but I love getting out on the trail, honestly, by myself with like, really good music and just, I've got like a ton of different playlists. So it just depends, but like, no, no, um, conversation, like, and just really letting myself center.
Um, and then my other like thing is like, I love to go and sit in a hot shower because for me, like that's where all of my intuitive moments come in. And like, I don't talk about it a ton of times, but like, when I don't have, like, I'm stripped of everything and I'm just like in there, like that's when I'm flooded with like all of the like probably the creatives and the ideas and like, you know, I feel like I feel my grandmother come through sometimes and like, you know, just so I think that that unplug is like truly for me is like on the hike.
Out in nature, um, really feeling grounded, uh, and, and in the shower.
[01:39:53] Jamie Grant: I'm gonna ask a question. Gimme one second 'cause I gotta make sure I get this. Do you think there is a quiet, complete vulnerability to that setting? Like there's no clothes to cover, right? There's no noise. That's ha Is that what you're getting at when you say like,
[01:40:15] Dr. Lisa Strohman: yeah.
Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that it really, and, and you can look, look at, there's no makeup, there's no clothes, there's, there's no
[01:40:21] Jamie Grant: noise, there's no, it is like literally just, and I mean this like in the most respectful way possible, right? It is just like us naked, like to the world, to our thoughts.
Completely vulnerable. Yes.
[01:40:30] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Yep. Yep. And I, and it's interesting, like a lot of people don't talk about that, but like when I start sharing this and like in these groups and you know, obviously now publicly, but it's like, I think people need to like understand that a bit more of like those moments. Are really, really important to listen in on, lean into what's coming through.
[01:40:51] Jamie Grant: I love that. So you talked about the trail run.
[01:40:54] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Yeah.
[01:40:54] Jamie Grant: And you talked about music. Yeah. And you're a psychologist with a JD and a PhD. Mm-hmm. And all these things, you, you got, you gimme one book in one band that you're convinced the world should know about that isn't well known enough.
[01:41:10] Dr. Lisa Strohman: The one book, which is probably recency effect for me, is what happened to you.
Uh, and if you haven't read that book or listened to it on audio, uh, they did a really good job. It's Oprah Winfrey. Um, but, but with like the neuropsychologist that, that I actually met through the bureau, um, who came through and like, they really give and personalize trauma and how it erodes into your later life.
And I think that I'll leave it at that, but that like what happened to you is a, is an amazing book. Um, and then song, um, gosh, I have so many that I love and I don't wanna song or band.
[01:41:48] Jamie Grant: This is a band. 'cause I'm, I'm Oh band. Say like, just a band that you think doesn't get enough appreciation or that more of the world should know about.
[01:41:57] Dr. Lisa Strohman: I would say the band I would, that I probably go to most is Imagine Dragons. Okay. But I love Adele. Like, so I just, you know, I've got it all. I've, I'm all over there. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. But Imagine Dragons is probably I'm all over. Yeah.
[01:42:13] Jamie Grant: Okay. Yeah. I'm all over cold play. I was too
[01:42:15] Dr. Lisa Strohman: soon. I don't know.
[01:42:17] Jamie Grant: You know, you said earlier that like, when the HR bot happens, and I couldn't help but think like, at least the HR bot couldn't go to the concert with the CEO until robots show up.
But, uh, I feel like those jokes are over played at this point. I know. Um, but there is such an interesting psychology, like I, I think like beneath the surface of what became all the memes, there's like the, the office team. There had to be so much that went into that moment, like the fact that they were in a suite, the fact that coworkers were there, the fact that it was so brazen.
Like there are so many fascinating elements to me of what is clearly a tragedy. Um,
[01:42:55] Dr. Lisa Strohman: and all I could think of was his kids and his family, the kids on most sides. Like
[01:42:59] Jamie Grant: it just, yeah. Yeah. Like that, you know, it's, it's interesting because, uh, those kids may not ha like their, their son and daughters of a, of a CEO of a billion dollar tech company, they probably have access to all the things they want.
People look at it and go, your life is easy. Um, that's like trauma that will follow. Mm-hmm. Like that's, that's real trauma that we'll follow. And I think that's something I didn't understand. All right. 'cause I, I'm looking at the clock and I know we have a hard stop. Okay. Two final questions. Um, what's your hottest take that you don't think should be controversial?
[01:43:33] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Hmm. The hottest case. I actually think you
[01:43:36] Jamie Grant: gave it with the gun in social media. Yeah.
[01:43:38] Dr. Lisa Strohman: I was just gonna say, I, I've had death threats given to me over saying I'm happy to talk about a school shooting if we're gonna talk about mental illness and not the Second Amendment, because I think that to me, that shouldn't be controversial.
Yeah. These, these kids, yeah. I mean these kids have, have issues and we're not, we're not treating it, we're not seeing it, we're not going upstream early enough. So
[01:44:00] Jamie Grant: it's fascinating to me that that's the only tragedy in society that we talk about the tool more than the user or the victim of the tool.
Right. Right. And I, I love where you're going. Um, alright. You get a walkup song when you walk into the office every day. If your team, or you picked your walkup song as you walk to the office, what would it be?
[01:44:22] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Um, it would probably be. Pharrell Williams happy. Is that the right, is that the right side? Mm-hmm.
Actually, and I say that because I just did a keynote and the lady who's like managing it, she's like, here's the itinerary, blah, blah, blah. She's like, what's your walkup song? And I was like, oh gosh, I don't know. And so I'm like talking to the tech guys 'cause I'm the nerd that like actually makes friends with the AV guys.
Yeah. And the guy just like you, you're just like so like bubbly and happy. He's like, how about this? And he put it on and I like danced my way up to the stage. So I
[01:44:50] Jamie Grant: don't know. I think it's impossible to listen to that song and not dance like it is. Right? It is really hard. Alright, here's kind of our signature that we have the most fun with.
You get to leave a question for the next guest.
[01:45:01] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Oh, that's a good one. But before that,
[01:45:03] Jamie Grant: you get to answer the question that Rajeev left you. Ooh.
[01:45:07] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Okay.
[01:45:07] Jamie Grant: Rajeev left you the question. How do you think about leading in this moment? Which I think is like the most perfect question for you. How do you think. About leading in 2025 with all of these things going on.
Like what, how would you sum up leadership and what does leading look like?
[01:45:26] Dr. Lisa Strohman: That's a great question. Um, see, I'm simultaneous with my a DD brain thinking what my next, I,
[01:45:32] Jamie Grant: I try and like, I always wonder if I'm like, hurting you by letting you know what's coming or if I'm helping.
[01:45:38] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Right. Um, okay, so what in this moment, I, what leading for me is what leading
[01:45:43] Jamie Grant: looks like right now.
[01:45:45] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Authenticity, integrity, and honesty, and the path forward that not all the answers are there, but we will get there together. I think that you have to have a humble nature about you to lead in this space. And you have to be willing to, uh, be authentic about yourself and where you, where you come from. And for me, I just, I don't meet a person that I don't feel their story.
I don't know how, if that means it. So for me, leading is. Feeling and encompassing like the emotions and the person and the people that I come in, in touch with.
[01:46:19] Jamie Grant: I, I'd argue that's why I think your background's really special to be clear.
[01:46:24] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Mm.
[01:46:25] Jamie Grant: I think there are other people with similar backgrounds. I think what makes you so exceptional is that you focus on the questions, not the, I have all the answers.
Yeah. I love that. Right. Like, it would be easy for somebody or lazy for somebody with all your experience and knowledge and just intellect to go, oh, I know the answer to that. Um, what I love in talking with you is that you have the questions. Okay? So you get to leave a question for the next guest, um, and you don't know who the next guest is.
'cause quite frankly, we have not finalized the next guest. Uh, but you get to leave whatever you want for the next guest. The way Rajiv left that one for you. What do you wanna leave him?
[01:47:05] Dr. Lisa Strohman: I would, I would say what is. The most humbling experience that you've had, and what did you learn from it in your space?
[01:47:18] Jamie Grant: You're so good. Uh, you're so good. Is it a good one? It is so good. Because like, the thing that I think is cool about this is like, it does create some, like when we knew that you were following Rajeev, we were like, oh my gosh, this is perfect. Uh, they're doing like, he does exclusive K 12 work, uh, and higher ed, not exclusive, but like overwhelming education space.
Um, you two will be such good friends when we, when we get together. Um, but it was like we, Paige and I were both like, man, Lisa is the perfect person to, to like follow Rajiv and kind of this education sequence, but also like the questions should be agnostic of that kind of thing. And so, right. I think your question applies to anyone.
Um, I didn't ask you, uh, the one actually. Okay. I, I, I could go back real quick. This one always gets dinner table conversation going, you stay at a friend's house. You don't have access. The morning when you go to leave to ask them the question of do I strip the sheets or make the bed? What is the, what is the appropriate thing to do when you leave a guest house and stay in the room?
Do you strip the sheets or do you make the bed?
[01:48:27] Dr. Lisa Strohman: So I always strip the sheets, make the bed, and put them in the laundry room every time.
[01:48:32] Jamie Grant: Love it. Love it, love it. Lisa, I know we ran over by a few minutes. Um, that's okay. I cannot thank you enough. Um, I, I love to, selfishly I love talking to you, but I also feel like people who listen to this, um, there's some stuff they're gonna get better.
We will make sure we collaborate with you on the show notes. 'cause I, I wanna make sure that we get your work exposed everywhere because I really do believe it's that important and we just wanna be a cheerleader. So thank you for doing this.
[01:48:59] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Thanks for having me. Like this is amazing and I I, I probably could talk to you all day, so, so excited.
I, I was gonna say like, I would
[01:49:05] Jamie Grant: love to, I would love to do more of these, uh, yeah. So subject to your calendar, we'll do this as often as you want on or off camera. 'cause you just make me better
[01:49:13] Dr. Lisa Strohman: Uhhuh. That's nice. Thank you. I appreciate you.
[01:49:15] Jamie Grant: Alright, thanks Lisa. We'll get you outta here. All right, thanks.
Take care. Thanks. Bye. Bye.