Exploring the effects of technology on the lives of boys and men in California

Below is a lightly edited transcript of David Sasaki’s opening remarks to the California Assembly Select Committee on Developing Pathways to Purpose for Young Men during the committee’s inaugural hearing on August 12, 2026. You can view the full hearing here.

Chair Valencia, members of the committee, thank you. My name is David Sasaki, and I direct the Boys & Men Online program at the American Institute for Boys and Men. We come to this work neither as champions nor critics of technology — our aim is to follow the evidence on where technology helps and harms young men, aiming for more of the former and less of the latter.

I’m sure we all have young men in our lives who we want to see thrive. I want to focus on one of them, a 24-year-old, who is a composite of several young men I know and I suspect he’ll remind you of someone you know, too.

Let’s call him Alex. He was born in Fresno and He was fifteen in the spring of 2018.

The smartphone he’d carried since middle school had already made pornography ubiquitous in his life. The average boy now first encounters online pornography around age twelve according to research by Common Sense Media — well before his first date or first kiss.

Boys are more likely than girls to consume pornography and to create AI pornography content themselves. But only 20% of teens report having ever discussed AI-generated sexual content with a trusted adult. Our collective avoidance of a fact-based and honest conversation about porn means that we are failing young people, who are navigating always available access to sexually explicit media, including on social media.

For Alex and his peers, any awkward approach or inevitable rejection of adolescent romance was preceded by years of engaging with a product that simulates intimacy without providing any of the romantic knowledge or social skills to help land a real romantic partner.

He was seventeen in the spring of 2020 when his prom and final baseball season were both canceled during covid. Developmental psychologists tell us that adolescence is when we build our social skills: how to flirt, how to resolve conflict and repair relationships, and how to be a supportive teammate. But Alex and his classmates spent much of that time at home, staring at screens.

Alex was eighteen during his freshman year of college, when campus sports were still shut down. The healthy sense of competition he’d always gotten from the field and sense of belonging from the locker room migrated to a group chat where his friends talked up their bets on an offshore sportsbook. He was under 21, and California has not legalized sports betting, but that hasn’t stopped many adolescent boys from betting on sports. 36% of boys 11–17 gambled in the past year, according to research by Common Sense Media.

When it wasn’t sports, it was crypto. He was nineteen during the 2021 crypto mania, checking coin prices between classes, and watching friends post screenshots of overnight windfalls. 38% of men ages 18 to 29 have traded crypto, versus 15% of women the same age.

And FINRA’s 2024 investor survey found 61% of investors under 35 make investment decisions based on influencer recommendations from social media. That is especially true for young men.

But it wasn’t all bad online. Gaming was how Alex stayed connected to his friends during the pandemic. 97 percent of teenage boys play video games, according to a Pew survey of teenagers, as do 73 percent of girls. But boys spend much more time doing it — about 10 hours a week in 2024, compared with two hours for girls. Another difference: 55% of boys say that playing video games has helped their friendships, compared to 30% of girls who said the same.

We should recognize the benefits while being mindful of possible risks. First, those online friendships largely didn’t convert into the offline relationships that Alex’s childhood baseball teams produced — the kind of friends who show up for you when your car breaks down. Second, the video games themselves changed: in-game purchases increasingly use casino-like mechanics that prime teenagers for gambling.

And through all of it, Alex was searching for what a man is supposed to be. Growing up, he heard the essential message about what to reject, but he encountered far less guidance in person about what to aspire to.

Only about one in four of his K-12 teachers was a man. The most consistent male voices in Alex’s life were surfaced by social media algorithms that prioritize provocative content.

Each of these platforms met a real need for Alex, which is what makes them so compelling. Pornography offered a simulation of intimacy and the excitement of sex. Gaming offered a sense of belonging, competence, and achievement. Gambling and crypto offered risk, status, and the alluring possibility of wealth. Influencers offered identity and guidance. But meeting needs is not the same as developing the life skills and relationships that give us meaning.

So where is Alex today, at 24?

Nothing catastrophic happened to him. He lives at home, does gig work, and any money he gained from his crypto investments has since disappeared into prediction markets. He games most nights with people he has never met in person and he has hardly dated.

One in four men under 30 report having no close friends — a fivefold increase since 1990 — and Alex is one of them.

42% of Gen Z adult men say they don’t feel needed by others. When asked what has made them feel like they lack meaning or purpose, the most-cited factor was excessive and unproductive use of technology at 52%.

No single moment in Alex’s story would have triggered an intervention. He didn’t make unusually bad choices, and his parents didn’t fail him. He simply accepted the defaults. And defaults are what good public policy can change.

I’d like to close with a few examples of what we’re seeing in other jurisdictions — not as prescriptions, but as evidence that the defaults are changeable.

First, the attention economy can fund the connection economy. Maryland enacted the nation’s first tax on digital advertising revenue in 2021 and directed the proceeds to education. A modest levy on digital ads could support youth sports and mentorship programs like the Governor’s Men’s Service Challenge, which we’re proud to partner on.

Second, we ought to be vigilant about gambling mechanics wherever they appear — including in video games. Belgium banned paid loot boxes, while Australia now requires games containing them to include mature age ratings. In 2018, four states introduced bills to regulate loot boxes, including California. None of them passed, and four years later, nearly half of 8th-grade boys report they have purchased a loot box in the past year.

Third, we can push back on the sudden and pervasive normalization of gambling. The United Kingdom adopted a “whistle-to-whistle” ban — no betting ads during live sports broadcasts. Italy went further, banning gambling advertising outright And Ontario, Canada barred athletes and celebrity influencers from gambling ads in 2024.

A young man should be able to watch an Angels or Athletics game without being barraged by gambling ads. AB 2617 would prohibit platforms from offering or advertising online gambling and prediction market wagering to minors.

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

The California Healthy Youth Act already mandates comprehensive sexual health education in grades 7–12. That framework can be updated to address pornography and AI-generated sexual content directly.

None of this is about taking things away from young men. It’s about restoring the offline experiences that were taken from them, and putting safeguards in place so that one bad night doesn’t jeopardize a young man’s future. Alex did not abandon a flourishing offline life for the internet. Rather, the offline institutions receded, and digital products rushed in to meet the needs they had served.

This committee has the power of policy to change the defaults for the generation following Alex. Taxes on the attention economy can help fund the offline spaces and programming that cultivate a young man’s sense of purpose and belonging. A few updates to California’s sexual health education can help prepare boys for our current reality, which is an online ecosystem awash in sexually explicit content that is meant to entice rather than educate. And proper guardrails and restrictions can push back against the normalization of online gambling, and its resulting harms.

I am grateful for your time and welcome your questions.

David Sasaki

Boys & Men Online Director