The Learning Curve Dr. Anna Lembke
[00:00:00] Alisha Searcy: Welcome back to the Learning Curve podcast. I’m your co-host, Alisha Thomas, Searcy, and joined by my other co-host, Dr. Albert Cheng. Hey, Albert.
[00:00:08] Albert Cheng: Hey, Alisha. How’s it going this week?
[00:00:10] Alisha Searcy: Pretty good. How about with you?
[00:00:12] Albert Cheng: Oh, not bad. I guess if there’s nothing to talk about, we talk about the weather and fall has finally arrived in Arkansas.
[00:00:19] Alisha Searcy: Yes, and it certainly has arrived in Georgia and in the Metroland area. We’re now down to just. Three seasons a day. Yeah. All right. Cold and gets warmer in the day, so it’s nice. I love it.
[00:00:33] Albert Cheng: I mean, it took long enough. I know our, our listeners in Massachusetts have been enjoying this for quite some time, so we’re late to the party.
[00:00:40] Alisha Searcy: Yes. Well, welcome. Right. It’s. I love outfits for the fall and I love the weather. So it’s a good time of year. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. So, uh, it’s time to jump in and talk about what’s happening in the world of education. Have any articles you wanna share?
[00:00:55] Albert Cheng: Yeah, sure. I saw this essay on the Atlantic. Your ears will perk up.
[00:01:00] I think at the Title America is sliding towards Ill. Declining standards and low expectations are destroying American education. And so I don’t think the author talks about anything. I mean, we’ve been listening to the podcast or are in kind of the education space that, you know, there’s nothing super new, I think.
[00:01:19] I mean, talks about declining NAP scores, potential role of cell phones in that potential role of low standards in that. And so, you know, all the. Different pieces I think are familiar, would be familiar to you, certainly Alisha. But you know, what I really appreciate from this author was the way she wove it all together and helps us to think about all those things together.
[00:01:42] Because, you know, I mean, we tend to think about these things in isolation, like, oh, blame the phones. But you know, she says, well, you know, there’s some. Blame here, but you know, here’s how it’s connected to other things and here’s what that research doesn’t answer. You know, questions that the research doesn’t answer and oh, maybe it’s low expectations.
[00:01:57] And, you know, charter schools kind of, you know, reneging on, on holding kids to high standards. Right? And, you know, and so she talks about all these things in the Mississippi Miracle. So anyway, I, I just wanna –
[00:02:07] Alisha Searcy: this is not a miracle, but that’s another story.
[00:02:10] Albert Cheng: Anyway. I really wanna encourage folks to read this. I think it’d be, it’s good food for thought as we try to think, you know, with a through line, I think for all the things that we, we talk about often on the show.
[00:02:20] Alisha Searcy: Yeah. And to your point, Albert, you are right. That title does make me perk up. I think the problem is other people aren’t perking up. Hmm. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that we’re heading towards illiteracy.
[00:02:32] And the score is certainly bare that way. And you know, we have all these conversations about how to teach reading. We shouldn’t be, we, we know what the research is and so we should be doing it. But we have all these conversations about like the political will, putting the resources behind it. To your point about, you know, what charter schools are doing, what they’re not doing. So I wish people were more concerned and they saw this as a real crisis.
[00:02:56] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, let’s, uh, hope some readers of this essay that they’ll perk up too, like you do.
[00:03:03] Alisha Searcy: I sure hope so. And speaking of perking up, the article that I wanna talk about comes from Ed Surge. It’s entitled Parents Think their Kids are Getting a Good Education.
[00:03:14] The public disagrees, so of course, I don’t think this is super surprising, but it says that the rate of US adults who are happy with the quality of K 12 education have hidden all time low.
[00:03:26] Mm. Yeah.
[00:03:27] Alisha Searcy: According to recent polling data. But a curious phenomenon shows up and the spotlight is on parents. And so not to be surprised, you think about this similar poll when people ask.
[00:03:37] How they feel about Congress versus how they feel about their congressmen. Right, right, right. I think it’s very similar. If you think about, and I, I don’t think anybody’s satisfied with our current Congress, but if you say, well, my congressman or my school is delivering a good education to my child, I think parents can sometimes be.
[00:03:59] Misled. And I would argue that sometimes it’s a little bit intentional by some people, not by teachers, not by school leaders. I think it is some people who are in more policymaking positions, and this is my opinion, where I’m looking at, for example, accountability standards, right? And how they’ve been watered down.
[00:04:18] And this is my soapbox, and this is not the first time that I’ve talked about this, but I think that. If your child is coming home with A’s and B’s in all of the core subjects in particular, right, ELA, science, social studies, math, they’re getting A’s and B’s. You’re thinking, my kid’s getting a great education.
[00:04:38] They’re learning. Look at the grades to prove it. But parents don’t really know their kids’ test scores and what that really means, right? Yeah. What do the make scores mean? What do the state assessments mean? Were those actual scores? Yeah. And so I think there’s a disconnect. Yeah. The article also points out, which is not a surprise either.
[00:04:57] That politics has gotten involved and the overall opinion of the state of education and how parents and, and the public feels has lowered. Mm. So that kind of sucks, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There have been moments in our history where we have seen bipartisanship around education. So I think at the end of the day.
[00:05:18] I want parents to really know and understand that there may actually be some schools that are doing great things and we love that. We wanna see more of that. Yeah. But as a whole. Maybe even in their school. It may not be all that you think it is. Yeah, and I think it, it speaks to why we need better accountability systems so that we know how students are performing and more importantly, when we get that information, we’re doing something about it.
[00:05:44] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. Well, wow. I mean, there’s, there’s a lot you said there, and we could talk about this for a long time. I mean, you know, some of the things you were saying also just reminded me of some. Lines in, in the Atlantic article. I mean the, if you just allow me maybe to just read this part. You know, she points out there’s an a CT study, you know, and it found that the share of students getting a’s in English rose from 48% in 2012 to 56% in 2022.
[00:06:08] Even as their demonstrated massy, the subject declined over that period. Mm-hmm. You know, and we saw high school graduation rates improve too, despite. Declines in other measures of academic achievement. So to your point about, you know, make sure parents have a, aren’t misled by things like grade inflation.
[00:06:23] There’s something to talk about there. And, and I mean, there’s plenty to talk about. And you talked about the political economy as well and lots of, thankfully lots of talk about, but yes. Um, yeah man. Wow. We’ve gotta wrap up though. But thanks for sharing that article.
[00:06:36] Alisha Searcy: Thanks for sharing yours. I need to read that essay for sure.
[00:06:39] And speaking of lots of things to talk about, we’re excited to have Dr. Anna Lembke, who’s a professor and medical director of Addiction Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, an author of Dopamine Nation Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Coming up next.
[00:07:08] Anna Lembke is Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. Her books include Dopamine Nation Finding Balance in The Age of Indulgence, an Instant New York Times bestseller and Drug Dealer, md. How Doctors Were Duped, patients Got Hooked, and why it’s so hard to stop, which the New York Times highlighted as one of the top five books to understand the opioid epidemic.
[00:07:38] Dr. Lembke recently appeared on the Netflix documentary, the Social Dilemma. She has testified before various committees in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. And maintained a thriving clinical practice. Lembke earned her BA in Humanities from Yale University and her MD at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
[00:07:57] Welcome to the show, Dr. Lembke. Thank you for inviting me. Great. Let’s jump in. You are a highly accomplished academic clinical psychiatrist and author of the New York Times bestselling book, dopamine Nation Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Would you talk to us about, first of all, what dopamine is and how it interacts with the human brain and why Americans daily lives and headlines seem to be dominated by a wide variety of growing addictions?
[00:08:28] Dr. Anna Lembke: Dopamine is a chemical that we make in our brains. It is a neurotransmitter, and neurotransmitters are the molecules that bridge the gap between neurons. That gap is called the synapse, and neurotransmitters allow for fine tune control of the electrical circuits that make us who we are. Dopamine is essential for the experience of pleasure, reward, and motivation.
[00:08:55] Now, it’s not the only neurotransmitter involved in that process, but it is the final common pathway for all reinforcing substances and behaviors. The more dopamine that’s released and the faster that it’s released, the more likely is that substance or behavior to be something that. Our brain tells us we need to do again and again because it’s important for survival.
[00:09:21] Dopamine is also the neurotransmitter that we know becomes imbalanced when we go from healthy adaptive use of a substance or behavior to unhealthy maladaptive and in particular addictive use. And what happens with repeated exposure to highly reinforcing substances and behaviors is that our brain gets overwhelmed by ongoing surges of dopamine such that it downregulates dopamine transmission.
[00:09:48] For example, by involuting postsynaptic dopamine receptors, not just a baseline, but below baseline, we go into a dopamine deficit state, and that dopamine deficit state can look a whole lot like clinical depression, anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and craving. We are now living in a world in which we have drug ified, almost all human substances and behaviors, including things that we typically think of as good for us, like exercise and reading.
[00:10:19] The result is that we’re all struggling with minor or major problems of compulsive over consumption, the most extreme forms of which we call addiction.
[00:10:30] Alisha Searcy: Wow. Thank you for that. Let’s talk about the age of sugar. The 18th century was considered the age of sugar due to its growing, highly addictive role in Western diets.
[00:10:42] In the 19th and 20th century saw the dramatic growth of things like alcohol abuse, culminating and prohibition, and the rise of TV occurred in the late 1940s and fifties. And more recently, we’ve seen several waves of opioid epidemics. Can you sketch for us the major lessons from the prominent food, alcohol, drug, and technology addictions found in American life?
[00:11:08] Dr. Anna Lembke: Sure. So since there have been humans, there have been humans who have been addicted. That has always been the case since there was an intoxicating berry bush out on the desert plane. There have been those among us who ate more berries than were actually good for us. And I postulate that the reason that.
[00:11:28] This particular genetic profile of over consumption has persisted is because in general it is advantageous to our survival because most of the time on our planet, we have lived in a world of scarcity and ever present danger where we had to work very hard to get a little bit of reward. What we have seen in the last 200 to 300 years is a scientific revolution.
[00:11:55] With the application of technology to all of these substances and behaviors that are reinforcing in one way or another, such that the history of recent industrialization and technological has been toward ever increasing potency. Ubiquity and novelty, not to mention access of the things that give us pleasure.
[00:12:18] So whether we’re looking at food and the addition of salt, fat, sugar, and flavorants, or we’re looking at alcohol and the evolution of more and more potent forms of alcohol or tv, which is now progressed to digital media. Which has now progressed to the uber potent form that we call AI or opioids, which started out as opium from the poppy plant, and now we have fentanyl 50 to a hundred times more potent made in the laboratory cheaply without needing any poppy plant at all.
[00:12:50] The story is the same. That technology has been applied to the things that our brain recognizes as necessary for survival, turning them from modest intoxicants into highly potent and ubiquitous drugs that are now bombarding our reward pathways.
[00:13:07] Alisha Searcy: In Dopamine Nation, you write quote, every patient is an unopened package. An unread novel, an unexplored land. Practicing psychotherapy is not unlike rock climbing. I immerse myself in storytelling and retelling, and the rest falls away. End quote. So, although it’s difficult to generalize, what are the overarching stories that you most often hear about? Our quote, age of indulgence, as well as how they shape modern American life and drive our culture of addiction.
[00:13:40] Dr. Anna Lembke: What’s remarkable to me is the consistency of the story of addiction. No matter what the individual is addicted to, no matter their temperament, background, culture, or upbringing, people start out using for one of two reasons. That is to have fun. Or to solve a problem. And by the way, that problem can be wide ranging.
[00:14:02] Everything from depression, anxiety, insomnia, to simple loneliness in boredom, if the drug works for them. And when I use the word drug, I’m talking about an all-encompassing term. That includes behaviors as well as substances. We ingest if the drug works for the individual, they are prone because we are rational creatures on some level to use it again and again to accomplish what we set out to accomplish.
[00:14:30] But because of the application of technology, the potency and ubiquity of substances, today, our brain is reeling from the fire hose of dopamine that we’re getting, such that we are now having to downregulate dopamine production and transmission, not just to baseline, below baseline, rendering us all in a constant state of semi withdrawal, experiencing the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance or behavior, which are anxiety.
[00:14:59] Irritability, insomnia, depression, and craving. And over time, the individual who is vulnerable to addiction will end up garnering more and more of their personal resources, time, energy, creativity, and money toward getting their drug or using their drug, hiding their drug use, and then starting all over again and eventually.
[00:15:22] It may come to pass that their reward pathway is hijacked by their drug of choice, such that they come to recognize the drug as necessary for survival, giving up all of the other important things in their lives in order to get more of that drug. And that is the story of addiction.
[00:15:41] Alisha Searcy: Wow. So my final question before I turn it over to Albert, this is really interesting. In your book you also write quote, the smartphone is the modern day hypodermic needle. Delivering digital dopamine 24 7 for a wired generation. If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon to a website near you, end quote, which also is quite entertaining to read. Um, could you discuss the growth of the internet, smartphones, and social media, and how technology is globally impacting people’s dopamine addictions and overall mental health?
[00:16:20] Dr. Anna Lembke: So we are fundamentally social creatures. We need each other to survive. When we move in groups, we protect ourselves from enemies. We steward scarce resources. We find mates, we are wired. Over evolution to connect with other people. Social media has essentially taken our drive for social connection and distilled it down into its most reinforcing aspects such that now we seek out and get social connection with very little upfront effort.
[00:16:55] When you compare the way that human connection is made on social media. To real life human connection. You really see the stark difference. Prior to 25 years ago, if we wanted to go out and find a mate, first of all, we had to get up off the couch and take ourselves outside and look for the people. And then when we found the people we had to do the work to engage them in relationship, we had to tolerate their boredom.
[00:17:21] Or perhaps they’re not the best looking or the most interesting. Perhaps they disagreed with us or we got into minor. Skirmishes about one thing or another, but nonetheless, we had to overcome those differences in order to preserve the relationship. Now, compare that to social media. We can sit on the couch, we can swipe right, we can swipe left.
[00:17:42] If we don’t like the way someone looks or we don’t like something they say, we can get rid of them and find something else such that now. With very little effort and almost no frustration, tolerance and very little investment of resources. We have access to a whole universe of stimuli that simulate social connection without necessarily their.
[00:18:06] Being real social connection there. And I think that is really the danger of social media, particularly when we use it to satisfy all of our emotional needs and we’re no longer turning to real people in real life. And this is really the danger of social media and AI and large language models that we will come to replace our relationships with real humans, with relationships that rely exclusively on non-human.
[00:18:35] Through the technology,
[00:18:37] Albert Cheng: Dr. Lembke, that’s such a well said, well argued way to characterize the contrast between social media and should we say more conventional and human interactions. I want to stay on this topic a little bit and put your work in dialogue with Jonathan. He and I think our listeners are aware of his recent book, the Anxious Generation, how The Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing An Epidemic, a Mental Illness.
[00:19:02] Tell us about what your book, Dopamine Nation and your medical research reveals about the relationship between smartphone, social media, and dopamine addictions among school-aged kids in particular.
[00:19:14] Dr. Anna Lembke: School age kids are especially vulnerable to the harms of social media on many different levels. Number one, they are more vulnerable to the addictive design and potential of especially certain forms of addictive social media because adolescents.
[00:19:31] Is characterized by a minimizing risk, maximizing gain, and seeking out social connection as part of what adolescents are supposed to do. So adolescents are a particularly vulnerable group. In addition, we know that adolescent frontal lobes are not yet fully hooked up to the adolescent limbic system.
[00:19:55] Which is a key driver of addiction risk as well. So if we conceptualize as we should, young people as a distinct population because of their young and developing brains and because of a unique vulnerability to addiction, not just to social media, but really all substances and behaviors. And then we combine that with the corporations that particularly pursue.
[00:20:22] Adolescent populations for a market for their goods, and include design features without safety guardrails to get kids hooked and to keep them online. We have the perfect storm for a generation of young people getting addicted to social media, which then leads to the psychological harms that Jonathan Het talks about in the anxious generation.
[00:20:48] Now, I outlined for you how. Addiction to any substance or behavior ultimately leads to anxiety, depression, irritability, insomnia, and craving. And the same is true for social media. We know that the more time that kids spend on social media. The greater their risk of developing clinical depression, clinical anxiety, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and other harms mediated by spending that much time online, which includes cyber bullying and sex exploitation.
[00:21:22] So. We as a society have a responsibility to our young people to protect their developing minds from a medium that was intentionally designed to hook them and can harm them in many other ways. So this is not, uh, like let’s cogitate on this some more and see whether or not we should rethink it. This is a dire public health emergency.
[00:21:47] Kids are an exceptionally vulnerable group. The increases in anxiety and depression among young people, including suicide that we are seeing in the last 20 years is, I believe, I agree with Jonathan Hyde on this directly related in part to the advent of digital media, social media, and the smartphone.
[00:22:09] Albert Cheng: It’s a sobering thought and, and yeah, lots of policy questions to think through in light of that. But short of figuring out policy solutions right now, I, I wanna get into some practical solutions that you discuss in your book that anybody can engage with. And so in chapter eight of your book, you’ve entitled it Radical Honesty.
[00:22:27] In it, you write, quote, every major religion and code of ethics has included honesty as essential to its moral teachings. All my patients who have achieved long-term recovery. Have relied on truth telling as a critical part for sustaining mental and physical health. Could you take some time to talk about radical honesty and truth telling, as well as how therapists and patients, teachers and students alike can develop this way of thinking about their lives and, and vocations.
[00:22:56] Dr. Anna Lembke: The average adult tells one to two lies per day. These are small lies that we barely notice. Little things to cover up our selfishness, our mistakes, things we’re ashamed of. We might lie about why we’re five minutes late for a meeting, or why we can’t attend a party that we’d rather not go to. We don’t even really register these lies, but radical honesty is the commitment.
[00:23:21] To telling, not a single lie at any point throughout the day, which takes effort again, because we are all natural liars on a small scale. And the reason that radical honesty is a worthwhile endeavor is because it’s very possible that radical honesty stimulates the prefrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex acts like the brakes on the car when it comes to repetitive drives.
[00:23:47] Radical honesty is a way for us to remain aware of what we’re actually doing with our lives and our time and our consumption because when it comes to compulsive over consumption and chasing addiction and dopamine, we are very prone to denial. Or to hiding those behaviors in the recesses of our minds.
[00:24:08] Radical honesty forces us to say, yes, it’s true. For the last two hours I’ve been watching Dr. Pimple Popper on YouTube instead of cleaning my room. Radical honesty promotes intimacy. We are often very afraid of telling people the truth for fear, that when they see our true selves and all of the ways in which we’re so flawed, they will run away screaming.
[00:24:31] But in fact, the opposite happens when we are truly. Open and disclosing of things that we’re afraid to admit. Things that we’re ashamed of people actually see in us their own humanity and come closer. So radical honesty promotes intimacy. That’s just really the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. Of why radical honesty is good, not just for people recovering from addiction, but for all of us.
[00:24:58] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, sitting here listening to it, it just occurred to me that it’s fascinating that the solution is actually very human. It’s to almost kinda restore a bit of our own humanity to, it’s kind of rescue us from these addictions and challenges that we face. Let me get us some other practical suggestions that you’ve raised.
[00:25:18] So I do wanna read this quote, speaking of humanity, and you have a background in, in studying the humanities. You write of the many dangers that awaited Homer’s Odysseus on his journey home from the Trojan War. The first was the sirens. The only way for a sailor to pass the sirens unharmed was by not hearing them sing.
[00:25:38] As this famous Greek myth illustrates one form of self binding is to create literal physical barriers and or geographical distance between ourselves and our drug of choice. So. Tell us about things like fasting, self binding, breaking down dopamine, addictions.
[00:25:55] Dr. Anna Lembke: The world that we live in now is characterized by ification of almost every human experience.
[00:26:02] That is to say we’ve made everything more potently reinforcing, more accessible, more bountiful, and more novel. And if we are going to have any hope of managing our compulsive overconsumption in this world of overwhelming abundance, we will have to engage like Odysseus in self binding. That is to say we must anticipate desire and create.
[00:26:24] Both literal and metacognitive barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice so that we can press the pause button on desire and consumption. If we wait until we are in the throes of desire, there is no more deciding we will consume because that is how we are wired to reflexively approach, pleasure and avoid pain.
[00:26:47] Self binding takes many forms. There can be literal barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice, like not keeping alcohol or potato chips or whatever it is in the house, or by locking up our smartphone at the end of the day in something like a kitchen safe where there’s a timer and we can’t get it till the next morning.
[00:27:07] By creating physical distance between ourselves and our drug of choice, we just give ourselves that little bit of a buffer to optimize the chances that we will remember why we didn’t want to use time can also be a self. Finding strategy, for example, committing to use our drug of choice only on certain days of the week, or only on special occasions, or only for certain number of minutes or hours per day, or as I write about in the book, using a Sabbath day, one day a week, or even a dopamine fast lasting a month where we give up our drug of choice for that period of time.
[00:27:47] And as you mentioned earlier. When I talk about theological traditions or philosophies, almost every major theological tradition has built within it a one month fast from a drug of choice. So that wisdom is accumulated over many generations, and now neuroscience shows that it probably is the way to reset reward pathways.
[00:28:09] : Mm.
[00:28:09] Dr. Anna Lembke: So these are just a few examples of self binding strategies and self binding more broadly is just really this notion that in a drug ified world where we’re always being tempted to consume, we have to build a world within a world.
[00:28:23] Albert Cheng: Wow. Yeah, this is an education podcast, so we have lots of folks interested in ed policies, teachers, educators, parents listening to this, and I just, I find it fascinating that it’s in these great texts, you know, at SEU and in some of these long established traditions where some way forward is laid out for us.
[00:28:42] So thank you for sharing. I do want you to read a passage, but before we get to that passage from your book, in your book you, you lay out 10 lessons of balance to help people establish a path forward. So could you summarize the most important lessons that our listeners should know about how to live a happier, more filling and less dopamine addicted life?
[00:29:04] Dr. Anna Lembke: Sure. So the lessons of the balance, there are 10 of them, but they can be. Briefly summarized as abstain, maintain and seek out pain. It’s a recipe that on the face of it doesn’t sound very appealing. But trust me, it, it is the way of joy, especially in a world of overwhelming overabundance, the world that we live in now.
[00:29:30] So the recommendation is to identify the thing we’re compulsively over consuming, to abstain from it for a period of time long enough to begin to reset reward pathways. This is not to say that this is a cure for addiction, but it’s just a window into recognizing how our consumption makes us feel worse.
[00:29:48] Over time, I recommend four weeks as this kind of starter kit for resetting reward pathways, maintaining that through exercises like radical honesty, uh, which increases awareness and intimacy and self binding, which allows us to rely not exclusively on our willpower. But also on physical and metaphorical barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice.
[00:30:14] And then finally leaning into pain. Mm-hmm. Not too much pain, but enough pain to kind of speed up the process of our brain, upregulating our own feel-good neurotransmitters. Not just dopamine, but also norepinephrine. Endogenous opioids, endogenous cannabinoids in response to pain. Our body responds by its own self-healing mechanisms, and that’s the idea behind leaning into healthy sources of pain, a very anti-modern perspective.
[00:30:45] Albert Cheng: Well, there’s so much more we could talk about, but I wanna close by letting you have the last word, and would you please, uh, read a passage that you’d like to share with us from your book?
[00:30:55] Dr. Anna Lembke: So this is from the end of my book where I talk about, throughout the book I talk about my own addiction to romance novels and erotica, and how over time I overcame that and ultimately it led to.
[00:31:10] Immersing myself more in my work and in my life, in my children, in my family, in my values, and how really addiction is about disconnecting from the world, and recovery is about reengaging with the world. So I will read the passage now. I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given.
[00:31:34] To stop running away from whatever you’re trying to escape and instead to stop and turn and face whatever it is, then I dare you to walk toward it. In this way. The world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe inspiring that does not require escape. Instead, the world may become something worth paying attention to.
[00:31:59] The rewards of finding and maintaining balance are neither immediate nor permanent. They require patience and maintenance. We must be willing to move forward despite being uncertain of what lies ahead. We must have faith that actions today that seem to have no impact in the present moment are in fact accumulating in a positive direction.
[00:32:25] Which will be revealed to us only at some unknown time in the future. Healthy practices happen day by day.
[00:32:34] Albert Cheng: Dr. Lembke, thank you for your radical honesty, if we might say, and for sharing your research. Your scholarship and your wisdom with us is such a pleasure. Thank you so much.
[00:32:43] Alisha Searcy: It was, thanks for being with us and it’s making us have to be radically honest too.
[00:32:47] I feel like I need to have a conversation with my husband, my daughter, myself. There you go. There you go. It’s worth it. Yes. We appreciate you very much and thanks for your work.
[00:33:10] Well, that was a great interview. I appreciate Anna very much, and I have, uh, I feel like I have some homework to do.
[00:33:18] Albert Cheng: I hear you and just even thinking about, you know, maybe what I need to do to make some changes in habit with my phone or, anyway, so planning to think about, and I hope that her work helps us to be a better people, a more balanced people.
[00:33:31] Alisha Searcy: Exactly. And you know, that’s the thing. We have these really important guests and conversations and I think it’s important for us to not only hear, but then to take action, especially when it comes to things that we could become addicted to, which I didn’t really realize. So this conversation today was really important.
[00:33:49] Before we go, we’ve gotta talk about our tweet of the week.
[00:33:52] Albert Cheng: Yeah. And that’s right Alisha. And so this week’s tweet, uh, is from Education. Next, a quote for his part, Scott Levy offers a dozen worthy suggestions for improving the functioning as well as the span of control of local school boards. But it’s an article, actually, it’s more than an article.
[00:34:07] It’s a book review. Written by a friend, uh, checker Finn, where he reviews Scott Levy, who’s a Harvard Professor’s new book about school boards, and also another one, you know, not to be overlooked by the tweets. Vladimir Cogan, who’s a professor at the Ohio State University, has a recent book on school boards as well entitled, no Adult Left Behind, how Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids.
[00:34:32] So check out that review and better yet, check out those books.
[00:34:35] Alisha Searcy: Yeah, definitely appreciate that. Well, thank you as always for joining and being together. I appreciate these conversations and, and talking to these guests with you.
[00:34:46] Albert Cheng: Yep. You bet. Yeah. Pleasure is mine.
[00:34:48] Alisha Searcy: Yes. And for our listeners, make sure you stay tuned for next week.
[00:34:52] We have a Woo Halloween episode coming up. Oh yeah. Happy Halloween. Coming up next week, we’re going to have Leo Dero. He’s the Earnest Burnbaum professor of literature emeritus at Harvard University and author of Storyteller, the Life of Robert Lewis Stevenson. So that’s gonna be a fun show for sure.
[00:35:15] Albert Cheng: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it, and we’ll get to hear some Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you know, to get spooky, I guess. Yes. Ooh,
[00:35:22] Alisha Searcy: I love that. Well, again, great to co-host as always with you, Albert, and thank you all for listening. We look forward to seeing you next week. Hey, this is Alisha. Thank you for listening to the Learning Curve.
[00:35:34] If you’d like to support the podcast further, we invite you to donate at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.
