1KHO 857: Being Human Is the Ultimate Competitive Advantage | Dr. Dana Suskind, Human-Raised

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is going to be an extremely busy month. I have to watch 104 soccer games, follow the pregame, the postgame, yell useless opinions at the TV.
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**Ginny Yurich** (0:30)
Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich, the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. We're going to be talking today about a book that every parent needs to read. It is called Human Raised. You want your kids to have the advantage of mostly being raised by a human in this age of AI. The subtitle is Nurturing Connection, Curiosity and Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI. Author Dr. Dana Suskind is here. She is New York Times bestselling author of Parent Nation and 30 Million Words. Founder and co-director of TMW Center for Early Learning plus Public Health. Founding Director of the Pediatric Cochlear Implant Program, Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at the University of Chicago. She's also authored more than 45 scientific publications and is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, a fellow for the Council on Early Childhood. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The Economist, Forbes, Freakonomics and NPR, sometimes Dana. I'm like, how am I even getting to talk to this person? Huge congrats on all of your success.

**Dr. Dana Suskind** (1:32)
Thank you so much. I'm the one who's excited to talk to you. What a movement you've built. So thank you.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:38)
Okay. So the new book that you have coming out, and actually it's going to be out by the time this podcast goes live. People can go grab a copy. It's a great book to read over the summer. Just like what kind of a parent do you want to be? What kind of a home do you want to have heading into the school year? Especially as this AI is progressing faster and faster. It is called Human Raised. So I would love if you could kick us off, Dana, with this front lines view you had of the waiting rooms. So you're working in pediatrics and it used to be really loud. And you were kind of like, oh, I wish it was quieter. But then it became quieter because kids are on screens and you say it's things have really changed and there's a lot that's being lost in the silence.

**Dr. Dana Suskind** (2:21)
Yeah, you know, I'm a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon, so my whole world is about connection and talking. And, you know, I've been taking care of children for longer than I'll admit. And I always used to walk into my waiting rooms and it was loud and noisy, you know, just the bustling of little kids laughing, crying, having meltdowns. And I used to joke, I'm like, oh, it's so loud. But in the last few years, it has become eerily silent. I mean, literally everyone from the mother, father, child, older sibling, toddler, infant is on their screen scrolling. And there was just this eerie silence that was a signal for, I think, something larger that we're all talking about that really got me going.

**Ginny Yurich** (3:06)
So you talk in this book, there's so many interesting topics that we haven't talked about on the show. There's things that I haven't even considered. And one of the things that you talk about is the fact that there are reasons why this is so hard to handle, scientific reasons. So you bring these up in the book and you talk about, you need to know what's going on because you wrote that the people who are behind artificial intelligence, who are making all this money, you wrote, they are counting on you not understanding the psychological and economic nuances that drive your decisions, they are betting that you are going to be a complacent consumer.
And so this book is about asking questions. It's about really understanding what's going on under the surface. And one of the big topics that you bring up is that our brains are wired to choose immediate relief over long-term benefit. And so we have this present bias. This is how our brains are wired. And so that is part of the reason why as a parent, we're tired, we're exhausted, we might just hand over a screen to sue the child.