Jonathan Haidt
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
No, that's right. We evolved for small group interactions with a lot of gossip. So when kids are talking in small groups and someone says something stupid and others make fun of them, people laugh and then you move on.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But when you put kids on a stage where potentially millions of people could be laughing at them and they could be the internet topic of the day and it might last for the whole week, a lot of those kids are considering suicide because when you are being shamed and it seems like you're out, A lot of kids will think of killing themselves because that's a way to relieve the pain.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So however, and the thing is, look, almost all of us as adults, we see this stuff. If you post stuff on social media and then you read the comments and then you can be upset by the comments. Imagine if you were 12 or 13.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's right. And so I just, you know, I really want to emphasize puberty as, puberty is one of the key ideas in my book. So in The Anxious Generation, I really focused on, well, the subtitle is How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. So while it's childhood that got rewired, from 2010 to 2015, it is unrecognizable.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
The change that happened in those five years is beyond what anyone could have ever imagined. And The millennials are fine because they were already done with puberty by 2010, largely. And so they had flip phones. When they were going through puberty, let's say ages 11 to 12, it begins typically a little earlier for girls, to 15, 16 is sort of the peak.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
It goes on until your early 20s, but it's especially early puberty, the early teens, the mid-teens, that is the period where your brain is literally rewiring. It is literally from back to front, changing over from the child form to the adult form, which is much more competent, but much less flexible.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
We don't respond to brain damage as flexibly as we did when we were children, because everything's locked in.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And so the difference between the millennials and Gen Z is that the millennials went through puberty on flip phones, and they actually, and they used those phones to meet up with each other, and they saw each other, and they got together in person, they made eye contact, they laughed together, they had a recognizably human childhood. By 2015, that's not happening anymore.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I mean, things have changed. And so if Gen Z, suppose you're born in 1990, let's say born in 2000. So you're seven when the iPhone comes out, but that's not so important because the iPhone doesn't change things for the first few years. You're nine when social media goes super viral, when you get the retweet button, the share button, the like button. The gamification. Yes, exactly. That's right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Social media changes radically beginning in 2009. And the status. The status aspect. Well, that's right. Because then it's not about me connecting with your page. It's now about the newsfeed and likes and what goes viral.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, absolutely. Let me just finish up the narration of Gen Z and we'll go right to that. So Gen Z had the bad luck that they went through all of puberty. So if you're born in 2000, you are, let's say you're a girl, 2011, 2012 is when everyone is changing in their flip phones for smartphones. 2010, you get the first front facing camera on the iPhone, and then Samsung copies that right away.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So 2010, you get the front facing camera. 2009, we got super viral social media. 2012, Facebook buys Instagram, and that's when it really becomes popular. In this period is when everyone's getting high speed internet. In 2010, most people didn't have it. So the point is the millennials in 2010 on their flip phones could not spend all day on their flip phones. What are you gonna do?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Texting like that difficult texting on the number pad all day long? Nobody did that. But by 2015, Gen Z, you can be on your phone all day long. And half of them say, literally half of American teenagers say that they are online almost constantly. So if they seem to be talking to you, they're thinking about what's going on on their phone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
If they're on the bus next to other kids, they're on their phone. If they're in class and the teacher's talking, they're on their phone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I'm going to take that line and try to remember to credit you for it. Watching the funniest thing. Okay. Watching the funniest thing. That's great. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Tell me more, what do you mean? If you solve those two things, so desire, yes, but it's all about cutting off desire.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
If you can just do two terms, I'd say evolutionary biology meets the problems of modernity.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Absolutely, absolutely.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, that's right. There's a great thinker who I know has talked about in Silicon Valley, Rene Girard, Frenchman who taught at Stanford. I read some of the chapters of one of his books and I read some summaries of his work and I think it's brilliant. And the key thing is this, we kind of naively assume that young people copy what they see other people doing. But that's not true.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
If my kid sees me doing something, they're not going to copy me. I mean, when they're two, they do, but not older. If they see some other kid doing something, they're not necessarily going to copy that just because the kid is doing it. Girard's point is what we copy is what they want. So if someone, we don't know what to want. I mean, yes, for hot, we want cool, but...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But if we can add in evolutionary psychology meets anthropology and cultural psychology with a little smattering of sociology in the head of a guy who is just really bothered when he sees systems and institutions screwing up, messing up, and he thinks to himself, wait, if we just did this, it would work better.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Beyond that, we don't know what we want. And so we're incredibly attuned to what everyone else in our reference group is wanting. And that's always been the case. And of course, advertisers in the 19th century began to pick up on that. How do you make it seem like everybody wants this product?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So advertising has always been about appealing, about trying to hack, trying to really activate this Rene Girard mechanism that we're copying each other's wants. And that's where I think influencer culture represents the, what, not reductive, like take it to its extreme conclusion.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Where I speak to young people, they come to ask me for advice on how to be successful, and some of them have not even thought about what they can do that would be of worth to anyone. All they're focused on is how to get more followers. So, you know, everybody wants likes and followers. So I want likes and followers. Well, you know, in the world before this, you had to do something to get prestige.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's right. And that's a trap. That's a trap that leads to unhappiness. That's right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And so I get deeply involved in what's going wrong with our democracy, and that's the righteous mind. What's going wrong with our universities? That's the coddling the American mind and my project at Heterodox Academy. And now what's going wrong with family life and children and people born after 1995? So I would just put a few more terms in there, but yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Okay, so let me just set this up by sort of jumping ahead to the notion of collective action problems and the four norms that I suggest in the book to break out of collective action problems. So the clearest collective action problem is any kid who doesn't get a phone is left out. And so the kid says, mom, I'm the only one without a phone. I'm in fifth grade. Everyone else has a phone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
They're making fun of me. And this hurts us as parents. So we say, okay, I'll give you, I have an old phone here. We'll reactivate it for you. And so you can end up in a situation where everyone has a bad outcome, which is you get to the point where now, in third and fourth grade, kids are all getting phones, and you sort of get there because everyone else is doing it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And Gen Z feels trapped on social media. I talk to my students, why are you spending so much time on TikTok and Instagram and five other platforms every day? You have no time to do anything of any use to anyone. And they say, well, I have to because I need to know what people are talking about. I don't want to be left out. So this whole thing is a set of collective action traps.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's how we got so deep into this. And so the solution is collective action. So in my book, I kind of assume that we might never get any real help from the federal government. There is a chance that COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, will pass. That is the one thing that really could pass. But I really wrote the book assuming there's not gonna be a legislative solution to this.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
We have to do this ourselves by changing norms. And so in the book I propose, I mean, I have like 50 suggestions, 50 ideas for parents and teachers and schools. But I realized, wait, four of these are just really foundational things that we can do together and they're really powerful. So in order, they are no smartphone before high school. We have to just clear this all out in middle school.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Middle schoolers should not be having the internet in their pocket. Give them a flip phone, give them a phone watch, give them something else, but not a smartphone. No social media till 16. Social media is wildly inappropriate for minors. It's full of extreme sex, violence, men from all over the world reaching out to you because they want sex.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I mean, it's insane that we have children talking with men all over the world. So no social media till 16. The third norm is phone-free schools. Lock up the phones in a yonder pouch or in a phone locker in the morning, they get it back at the end of the day. And the fourth norm is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world because Until the 1990s, kids had a childhood.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
They were outside a lot. They had adventures. They learned to be self-governing, self-supervising. We took that away from them beginning in the 90s, totally gone by 2015. So our kids never get any fun or adventure. So all they have is their screens.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So if we do those four things, we break out of these collective action problems, we restore childhood, we delay the full social media immersion until age 16 when they're halfway or more than halfway through puberty. That's my basic proposal. So those are the four.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Oh my goodness. Yes. Yeah. That's what's so exciting about this is that, so I propose these four norms, I have this analysis of what happened at Gen Z. I paint Gen Z as a generation that's been damaged, that's gonna be less than they would have been. They're less ambitious, they're less successful, they're less happy, they're less competent.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And I've given a version of this talk in middle schools, in high schools, in universities, and I always ask at the end of it, what do you think? Did I get your generation wrong? And I usually try, if I remember, I usually say, okay, question time. If you think I got something wrong, please raise your hand now, you know, or please be the first up to the microphone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And maybe one time someone said, I think you got this wrong. The other, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of times, they say, yep, that's basically right. Now, maybe some of them are too shy to speak up, but my point is, young kids like, you know, nine, 10, they desperately want phone, TikTok, everything.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But by the time they're in late high school or certainly college, the overwhelming view I find among Gen Z is, wow, did this mess us up? Not that I'm gonna quit because I don't wanna be alone, But man, did this mess us up. And that's why when you ask them, do you wish social media was never invented? Most of them say, yes, I wish it was never invented. So Gen Z, Gen Z is incredibly supportive.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
If you go to the website for the book, anxiousgeneration.com, we have all kinds of activities for parents and teachers and Gen Z. We have writing on my sub stack after babble.com by Gen Z. That's why this is so different from any previous tech panic is that the kids themselves see the problem.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, it's definitely a continuation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So it began when Greg Lukianoff, who is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, noticed that all of a sudden around 2013, 2014, it was actually the students who were demanding protections from speech, from books, from speakers, shut this down, ban this, stop this person from speaking. And he came to me and said, something's wrong.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Something's really different about students today. It wasn't like this in 2012. something's changed and they are more fragile. They want more protection from words, books, speakers. They think speech is violence. And at the time we thought that these were millennials, because that was the name for the young generation, millennials.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And so we wrote an article on this in Atlantic, like laying out what we think is happening. Something is teaching these students to think in these distorted ways that are like cognitive distortions. And then in 2015, so the article comes out August, 2015, in October, 2015, or November, 2015, everything blows up beginning at Yale, the Halloween costume protests, all sorts of things.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Universities undergo a kind of a cultural revolution, really some very similar, a lot of similarities to the Chinese cultural revolution of pulling down everything high, pulling down everything old, a kind of a revolutionary young people's movement, shaming professors, spitting on professors, all that sort of stuff. Now, so what's the continuity today?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
One of the worst things that the leaders did back then, the university presidents, is they did nothing. Students would shout down speakers. No one was ever, ever punished for shouting down speakers, even when they used intimidation. Claremont McKenna did punish some students in 2018, but hundreds and hundreds of shout downs, no one ever punished.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
The message was, oh, as long as you're protesting for social justice, you can break the rules. You can use intimidation. You can shout people down. You can bang on glass and make people afraid for their lives. You can do those things because it's for a good cause. And besides, we're actually kind of afraid of you too. So that was the precedent that was set.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And that, I believe, was the beginning of one of the greatest brand destructions in American history. Higher ed used to have one of the greatest brands in the world. Elite higher ed was the envy of the world. Now it's a laughingstock. Harvard is a punchline in jokes around the world, certainly in America.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And so it was because there was fear, there was lack of leadership and we permitted intimidation rather than persuasion. Universities must be about persuasion. You can never win an argument by saying, if you don't agree with me, I'm gonna hurt you, I'm gonna destroy you socially. We can't allow that, but we did. And so now along come the protests.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So of course the October 7th, the massacre was horrific. The Israeli response has produced horrific suffering and death. Yes, it's normal and expectable that there would be debates on a college campus. And nobody that I know of is saying people shouldn't be protesting in favor of the Palestinians.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But the question is really about the encampments and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of the university, to pressure the university to make a statement pro-Palestine or anti-Israel or to divest from Israel. So this is the use of intimidation and disruption, which... They allowed for nine years before.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
They said since 2015, as long as you're protesting for social justice, you can do whatever the hell you want. We're not gonna punish you for anything. So now this sort of the intersectional social justice protests that are pro-Palestine and often anti-Israel and often shading anti-Semitism, the presidents don't know what to say.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And that was the spectacle we observed on December 5th in that house hearing room of the three presidents who could not explain why it was against their policies for people to call for death to the Jews. Like, they couldn't, they had been so tied in a knot with their hypocrisy, they couldn't even explain it. So yeah, there's a very direct continuity.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's right, exactly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
No, good. No, that's right. And that's another point of continuity from the coddling. So the central idea of the coddling was that there are three great untruths, ideas that are so bad that if any young person believes all three, they're almost certain to be depressed, anxious, not amount to much in life. And those three are what doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So avoid stressful experiences, avoid speakers who are going to say things that you hate. Don't expose yourself. Always trust your feelings. Your feelings are right. If you feel offended by something, someone has offended you and someone has to do something about it. Someone has to punish that person.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And the third, to your point about duality, is life is a battle between good people and evil people. And this is the distortion that's caused the most human misery. I mean, this is a normal thing people do. This is part of being a tribal species. We're very, very good at coming together to say our side has been hurt or cheated or defiled by their side. They're the evil ones. They're perfectly bad.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
We're perfectly good. So it's that third distortion is really the most pernicious from a societal level. Now, what you just said before about the haves and the have-nots, that's what the left used to be about from the time of Marx or the French Revolution even until the 1950s or 60s, it was about the haves versus the have-nots.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And the left was the one that stood up for the have-nots and the left stood up for the poor and the people. But we go through a period in the 60s and 70s of the conversion away from a sort of a Marxist idea based on economics to something, is it a little bit Marx? Is it Michel Foucault? There's different intellectual heritages here where now it's all about power.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
It's not haves or have nots, it's power. And power is such that Whatever you look at in society, you will see that some people have power and privilege and they use that to oppress the opposite. And this is what intersectionality is about.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
It starts with a perfectly legitimate point that there are multiple dimensions of identity and to be a black woman is not just the sum of being black or being woman, there are unique indignities that hit black women that you don't notice unless you are tuned into this. intersectionality begins, you know, Kimberlé Crenshaw with a very good insight, which I think is absolutely right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But the way it plays out on campus, what Greg and I argued in our book, is 18 year olds coming onto campus, they're easily lured into this incredibly simplistic and exciting way of looking at the world, which is, I don't have to know anything about you. I can just look at you and I can say, oh, you're a man. Oh, you're a white man. Oh, that means that you're an oppressor.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And I can feel virtuous to the extent that I am not that. And this puts a lot of pressure, especially on white kids, to try to develop some identity as a victim, which is incredibly disempowering and just not good for their development.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And what we end up with is a movement that thinks in these binary terms, and this is what brings us to today, is, of course, Jews, I'm Jewish, we always thought that we were among history's victims, and certainly you can't understand the creation of the state of Israel without understanding what happened in the Holocaust.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But because of the way intersectionality played out, because whiteness is so quintessentially evil, like whiteness is the thing that is ruining everything. So everything that's not whiteness unites together to fight whiteness. Now, most Jews, as I understand it, most Jews in Israel are actually Sephardic. They're not from Europe, but in America, Jews are coded as white.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And therefore, if there's a conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians, then obviously one is the oppressor, one is the oppressed. Now, obviously economically, Israel is wealthy, Israel is powerful. So it's not that there's no legitimacy to that view. Obviously there's a huge power differential in Israel versus Gaza. But the mindset that says,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's right. I mean, things change at different speeds. And of course, evolution works extremely slowly, unless you are a plant biologist who has a company that is making it happen very quickly. But until very recently, our psychological evolution or the evolution of our minds happened at the level of tens of millennia. And then culture changes more slowly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Everything is about power is so narrowing, incorrect, boring, and offensive. I spent so many years trying to help the left using moral psychology so they would stop losing elections. And I finally decided they're beyond hope. The right's beyond hope too. But... You know, the left is losing Asians, it's losing black men, it's losing Hispanics in the time of Donald Trump. Why is this happening?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
A big piece of it seems to be this oppressor-victim mindset pushes policies that are so offensive to most people of every race that they're like, I've had it with the left. I don't like this. So sorry, that was a rant. That was more of a rant than an answer to your question, but I hope it was entertaining.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, I think things are changing. So at least on, you have to look institution by institution. And so at least on campus, things got insane in 2015. I mean, it was, again, it was like the cultural revolution began in 2015. It wasn't like this in 2012. And I started a group called Heterodox Academy. If there are any professors listening to this, please join Heterodox Academy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
We advocate for viewpoint diversity among professors. We think that we shouldn't all think the same. We shouldn't all be on the left and progressive. And every year since 2015, things got worse and worse and worse. And especially 2020 with COVID, then especially George Floyd, a lot of progressive ideas got supercharged. Ibram Kendi became the patron saint. Everything was about anti-racism.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So that's when things really became completely bonkers. Not just on campus, but in journalism, in museums, firing all the white guides. Just crazy stuff was happening 2021, 22. Many businesses went that way, but businesses have to actually make money. And so by 2022, a lot of businesses were rolling it back. They're saying, whoa, this stuff is terrible. This is not...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
making life better for members of minorities. This is actually just turning everyone against everyone. We all hate this. So business has begun definitely moving away from all this stuff. Universities, we're not really moving away until December 5th. I think December 5th, that hearing was so humiliating for higher ed. I think a lot of us feel much freer now. We feel like, you know what?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
The intersectional, the sort of the people who will destroy your reputation if you question them. They're on the defensive now. We don't hear much from Ibn Kendi anymore. We don't hear him referred to very much anymore. So I think that at least even on campus, the pendulum is swinging. I was afraid it wasn't a pendulum. I was afraid it was more like a tower that just falls faster and faster.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But I do think, because the great majority of professors and presidents are true liberals. They're on the left, but they believe in free speech. They're not illiberal. What I think has happened on the far left and the far right, we have illiberalism. So the far left is not liberal. The far right is not conservative.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And most of us, the 70% in the middle, are actually pretty reasonable people who could live together, but we're all afraid of the extremes. But we're less afraid of the extremes now than we were a year ago.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And really, the origin of sociology is really in the huge changes in the 19th century. wrought by the industrial revolution.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
You have to look institution by institution. And so in institutions that are governed, that are dominated by the left, and that is all the knowledge creating institutions. So it's journalism, the arts, media, universities, most of the scientific establishment, other than the hard sciences. In all those areas, yes, I think the left took it too far.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
You know, we went into a point where everything like chemistry has to be about anti-racism and, you know, everything has to be about race. And that was just kind of nuts. And so I think there is a kind of a move to a more common sense view.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So I'll answer your question as a psychologist, which is one of the amazing discoveries in psychology since the 80s is that almost everything about our personality is partly heritable. And if you have an identical twin separated at birth, you never met. But if you're very much on the left, your twin probably is too. Something about our brains make us predisposed to the right or the left.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And it goes back to openness to experience and conscientiousness, a few personality traits. But basically, there's a liberal or progressive sentiment that says, it's captured by this Robert F. Kennedy quote, some men see things as they are and say, why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So progressives historically are the people who look at existing institutions and say, why don't we change this? Like, why don't we have some other thing which might be more just? So progressives are always pushing for progress, for change. But then the wisdom of the right is to say, you know what?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I guess, sure. For you guys, it's the first industrial, that's right, yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
We may not understand our institutions, but if we just go changing them willy-nilly, it's gonna be a disaster because we don't understand what we're doing. In fact, I opened our conversation with that. That's actually something I learned from reading the conservative intellectuals, going back to Edmund Burke. You can't just go messing with institutions and expect it to work out well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So a good liberal democracy is one in which you have some people pushing for change. You've got other people saying, slow down, like not so fast, like let's be careful about this. And that's William F. Buckley's famous quote about national review is going to stand to thwart history yelling, stop, or at least slow down. So that's great.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Like you have a car with a gas pedal and a brake, like you need that. And what happens when there are no conservatives? What happens when there's no one to say, slow down? Progressive revolutions have an almost perfect record of disaster. I mean, it always descends into chaos and economic chaos and cruelty. And what happens when there are no progressives, when it's all conservative?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
You tend to get much more repressive, certainly LGBTQ rights. I mean, you get very predictable pathologies on either side.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And part of my analysis, what I think has gone wrong in our country, I'm very focused on what social media has done to society as well as to Gen Z, is there always was a distribution where most people on the left are reasonable left, they're progressives, I'm sorry, they're true liberals.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Right. And, you know, because often we can see that we can see changes on the surface, like, oh, people will now have more access to information. That's great.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
They believe in a John Stuart Mill vision of a society in which people are maximally free to construct lives that they want to live. That I think is the heart of the liberal vision of a liberal society. And on the right, you have conservatives who generally believe in tradition, family, group loyalty, religion, the things that bind us together and limit bad behavior.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
This is Thomas Sowell talking about the constrained vision of humanity. So that's all healthy. And then you always have some far left radicals who they become Maoist in one generation, they become Robespierre in another, they chop off heads, prone to violence on the far left. You got a group prone to violence on the far right that are reactionary, that are authoritarian.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And let's say there was some distribution. Now then along comes Twitter, along comes Facebook, along comes social media. What happens? Mark Zuckerberg used to say, how could it be wrong to give more people more voice? That sounds great. But what if you're not giving the disempowered more voice? What if you're not giving everyone voice?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
What if you're bringing everyone into the Roman Colosseum and saying, okay, let's fight it out for the entertainment of the people in the stands. And the great majority of people don't want to fight with swords. They just go quiet. And some people pick up the swords like, yes, let's go. And so the far left becomes super empowered. The far right becomes super empowered.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And the center left and the center right go silent. And that's what I think is, you know, that's I think a real disaster for our country
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But a lot of the early sociologists like, you know, Weber and Durkheim and Tunis and all these, you know, German, European guys, they could see that something, something very deep about the way we live together is changing in ways that we don't really understand. And, you know, one of my concerns, again, we'll talk a lot about this, I hope, I love technology. I love my phone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So don't think of it as though liberalism and conservatism have flipped. Think of it as though the left and the right have really changed. One thing I learned from studying conservatism from the intellectual historian, Jerry Mueller, is that conservatism in every era is a reaction to the excesses of the left.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So if the left was the revolutionaries in the French Revolution, the right were monarchists. They wanted the restoration of the king. If the left... in America is about pulling down the founding fathers because they were slave owners. The right is going to be, no, we're gonna get extra patriotic. We're gonna wear funny hats like the 18th century Americans.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So you always have to understand the right as a reaction to what they perceive to be the excesses of the left. Now, a lot of what's happened is, as I said, the left is a political coalition that votes similarly in elections, same with the right. It's made of a mixture of different kinds of people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
There's a wonderful study from More in Common that talked about the seven tribes or seven groups of Americans. The progressive activists, which is the group on the furthest left, they were never liberal. In fact, they're really illiberal. They're not even about bringing up the bottom. They're much more focused on pulling down the top. That's like the ugliest side of egalitarianism.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So they're very focused on restraining rich people, pulling down privilege. They don't seem as concerned about bringing up poor people. So that's the far left. They're not liberal. But now, but for a while, they were really dominant. Not in the Democratic Party. This is an important point. The Democratic Party has two wings. Which one usually wins? The liberal, the moderate wing, not the squad.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So if you just look at the parties, the Democrats are a functioning center-left party with an outspoken progressive wing. That's great. That's viewpoint diversity. I love that. The right is different. If you just look at the party, you used to have all kinds of true conservatives, George H.W. Bush through Mitt Romney. They were true conservatives, very decent men.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I love all the convenience. I'm not anti-tech, but one thing that I'm thinking a lot about is how you guys, whatever, the tech industry out in the West Coast, you do employ a bunch of social psychologists, like especially Meta, a few other companies, not necessarily for good, I think sometimes for manipulation, but you do employ some social psychologists.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
They believed in decency, family values. I mean, they have a lot of respect for traditional conservatives. But now it's the party of Donald Trump, and the Republican Party has gotten rid of nearly all its moderates. Now the Democrats pulled some dirty tricks that actually wiped out a few of those moderates, which I think they really have a lot to answer for.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But my point is, if you just look at the parties, the Republican party has been gutted of its moderates. Now they do crazy, insane things like let's work really hard to solve the immigration problem Oh, Donald Trump says, let's not do it. Okay, let's throw it out the window. I mean, insane stuff that is really hurting the country. So I just want to make it clear.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I talk a lot about universities where the villain is the left. There really is no right to speak up on university campuses. But in Washington, I think the Republican Party is the party that's really... gone farther off the reservation, or if one can still say that today, whatever, you know, that's gone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah. So the answer is collective action. So for each, each kid feels left out, but what if you, so I assume you you're in contact with the parents of your kid's friends, right? Cause you gotta drop them off, pick them up. You do all sorts of things. So what if you were to talk with the parents of a few of the friends who don't have, haven't given phones yet?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And you say, hey, we don't want our kids to have a phone-based childhood. Do you agree with me on that? If we work together, John Hite says, if we work together, we can actually give our kids a fun childhood. Are you in on that? And what that means is we're gonna follow the four norms. We are not giving our child a smartphone until high school. Let's just commit to that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Now, we should be sending our kids out, in which case, like I bought my daughter a phone watch, a Gizmo, it could call three numbers, that was it. And that was enough for two or three years. That was all she needed. She could go out and do errands. She could go get bagels. She could go bring food to my office across the park.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So it's okay to give kids a way to contact you, but you just all agree, no smartphone. And you all agree, no social media until 16. And that even includes Snapchat, which is what the kids are using to communicate, but just lots of bad stuff happens on Snapchat. And it just makes them-
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah. Well, yes, if you can, it's hard to hold the line on your own. It's much easier if you have three of you holding the line, but it's even better if it's not holding a line, it's offering a more positive vision of childhood. So you and the kid, so your kid and the other kids who were your parents who all agree,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I've never heard of any company that employs a sociologist. And what I mean by that is the changes that are coming to us because of tech are so earth shattering and so fast that they are changing the basic conditions of America's liberal democracy in ways that I think it may not survive.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
You make extra efforts to give your kids an exciting, fun childhood where they do exciting things together. The other kids can be home on their bed swiping all day long. Let them do that. They're going to end up basically anxious and never having really done anything to grow up.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Whereas your kids are getting together for four-way sleepovers where you're taking them, you know, bowling and you just, you know, you just, well, to the extent that you're allowed to, you step back, like you let them be self-governing. You know, you give them money, you give them an allowance, I suggest in the book, be really clear about chores, allowance, and encourage them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Go ride your bicycles down and go get ice cream. You know, go get ice cream just before dinner for all I care. Be a little rebellious. So if you, you know, we've really taken almost all the fun out of childhood. There's very little adventure left in childhood.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, that's the common rule. That's right. Tell me how you do it because there's a lot of questions around it. How do you do it today?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's how we did it in Brooklyn. And that's why Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
It's the withdrawal, that's right, because once you've had hyper-stimulation of quick, easy dopamine, those systems down-regulate, they react, they try to restore homeostasis, and now it takes more stimulation to get them to the normal level.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Now you take away the video games, you take away the phones, and for, Anna Lembke says it's two or three weeks to overcome withdrawal symptoms, especially for more serious drugs. But in my experience, it's more like, it's like a few days. The first three or four days are really bad. But by a week, actually, they're mostly over it. That's what you find. Like summer camp.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That is all the assumptions made by the founding fathers about how we live together, how news travels, why passions affect the legislature, all those assumptions. might now be rendered moot in ways that we do not understand and no one is studying. And so anyway, that's just one of my causes for concern.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So send your kids to summer camp and never send your child to a camp that allows kids to keep phones on them. Never do that. That's a wasted opportunity for detox.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, that's right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
For the heavy users, especially. I mean, I try to avoid saying brain melted. I try to be a little more precise. For the heavy users, and this is the thing, about five, depending on how you measure it, about five to 12% of the boys do become problematic users of video games. So for most boys, video games are okay. They're a lot of fun. And I wouldn't say video games are melting most boys' brains.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
But 5% to 12% is a lot of boys to lose. And these are boys who are spending, you know, three, four, five hours a day on video games for years and years and years. They don't develop social skills. They don't develop dating skills. These boys, I think, are... That's right. Exactly. Exactly. It's just...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah. Tell me more about what you're seeing in Silicon Valley in the tech industry. Are you talking only about boys? Are you saying girls are this way? Girls aren't making eye contact?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Internalizing disorders, that's right. Internalizing disorders, yeah. And tell me how Gen Z employees are working out in general. They don't.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And that's what I hear very widely.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Well, Canada is almost as bad as America. Canada has problems too. They're very much like us. But I agree, immigrants who are from non-English speaking countries, that's right, they have a better work ethic. And I'm going to, you know, what I'm hoping that we'll get to is because this problem is so wide, like this is what I, you know, I work in a business school.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I talk to a lot of people in business. I always ask that question. I always hear the same thing. I've never heard anyone say, oh yeah, young people are so wonderful. People are having problems integrating Gen Z employees into their companies. They're fragile. The top 20% are fantastic.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So what do you think about this? What about like, instead of like don't hire American kids, saying look for signs that this person can be a team player and work with other people. So especially go for anybody who's ex-military, anybody who was major team sports,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Okay, so that is similar to what I hear a lot from people who are hiring young people. But let me suggest one slight variation that you might try. Because a really good thing about Gen Z is that they're not in denial. All the things you say about them agree with what I say in the book. I think that's basically true.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
What I'm finding in my teaching, what I find in general, is that if you approach them in the right way and you, first of all, they have to understand the concept of anti-fragility. Very easy to explain, chapter one of The Coddling American Mind. If you go to thecoddling.com, I have chapter one, we put it up there so that everybody can use it. Send it around to all your employees.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
You know, it's what doesn't kill you actually makes you stronger. And you grow through adversity and it's stoic wisdom and it's wisdom around the world. So if you have that concept and you're talking about it, and then you say to your new Gen Z employees, okay, now we can do this in two ways.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
One is, since I really want you to be successful in this job, so I'm going to tell you everything I think you're doing wrong and I'm going to try to make you better. That's option one. Option two is I can be really sensitive about your feelings and really try to make everything gentle and try never to upset you. Which one do you want?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And I guarantee you the great majority are going to pick option one because they do want to grow. They're not in denial. They're not defensive. They're not like, no, I'm not like that. So I... I especially would not, I'm not giving up on Gen Z, especially those who are still in their early 20s, you know, because that's who I'm teaching at NYU and they show incredible growth.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Now, it's exciting because they're doing it together. I have a class of 35 students, we're doing it together. But if you have a cohort, you know, if you're selective in your hiring and you try to avoid the ones who are most, you know, showing the signs of the sort of, you know, the extreme activism and the extreme emotionality,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
If you have a group and you're explicit that you want them to get stronger, you want them to succeed, and that's why I'm going to give you some harsh feedback, I think actually they generally love it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Well, let's hope that parents and schools realize the truth of what you're saying. And we get to the point where college admissions and hiring is not just gonna go for the high GPA and the full resume of extracurricular activities. They're gonna go for signs of being a free range kid.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
They're gonna go for signs that you traveled alone, you traveled on your own for three months someplace when you were 18 or 19. They're gonna go for signs that you actually can handle adversity.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
That's right. Major kudos to Coinbase. They were the first one, Armstrong, he was the first one to really put that out there. And a lot of companies followed. Yeah, that's right. But he was right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Thanks so much, guys. I just want to put in just a quick note. To learn more, go to anxiousgeneration.com is the website for the book. Afterbabble.com is my sub-stock. We put a lot of research, a lot of writing. And letgrow.org is an incredible organization that we created with North Skanezi to give parents like you more help, more ideas in how to give your kids a free-range childhood.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So I hope if there are any philanthropists in the audience who are willing, it's a tiny little organization. We could do so much more if we had some money and could hire more staff. So letgrow.org.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Exactly, exactly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Thank you so much, guys. Thank you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I think so. And just to build on that, there was a lot of research on television. Television came in relatively slowly compared to what's happening now. And television was kind of hypnotic and some kids could watch for hours. I did sometimes. But just as like the move from heroin to fentanyl kills lots and lots of people, because fentanyl is so incredibly concentrated.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
The move from television to algorithm driven social media, where it's not just like mass marketed, we think this show, you know, Nielsen ratings say this show is popular. It's we have AI targeting this at you, we're targeting feed at you. So what happens when you have a society in which kids are consuming media, they're playing sports, they're reading books, they're doing all sorts of things.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
What happens if the media consumption suddenly gets a hundred times more attractive or addictive or short-term dopamine focused? And I think there are huge, broad societal implications that we don't understand. And I'm very concerned by them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I'm baby boomer by two years. I'm the end of the baby boom, 63. Got it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, I think this is the right way to look at things, to look at how the changes in technology, even if they seem to be gradual, they can have just really outsized effects. When I wrote, I turned in the manuscript for the book in last August of 2023, and I'd only taught this undergrad class on flourishing once. I taught it as a grad class for a long time, but I teach at NYU Stern.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And in the fall, I taught it again after I turned in the book. And one thing I really learned from my students is that TikTok and then YouTube Shorts, the ones copying it, Instagram Reels, they're uniquely horrible. And there are many reasons why they're horrible. And let's start with the contrast.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So as a little experiment, I said to my class, how many of you watch Netflix every week, at least once a week? Almost every hand goes up. How many of you wish that Netflix was never invented? Nobody, no hands go up. because stories are wonderful. Humans live in stories. We tell stories. We've always told stories. The stories on TV are so much better today than they were when I was a kid.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I'm older than you guys, but I remember like, I Dream of Jeannie and, you know, The Brady Butt. There were stupid shows.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So stories are great. There's no problem with stories, no problem with Netflix. And then I say, how many of you use TikTok or one of those programs at least once a week? Not everybody, but the great majority of hands go up. How many of you wish that it was never invented? The great majority of hands go up.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And what's happening, and these are 19 year old, they're smart kids, they're mostly sophomores at New York University Stern School of Business. But these things aren't stories. A story is entertaining, but it doesn't give you a huge hit of dopamine. If it's really well told, it can be an aesthetic experience. You lose yourself, but it's not about the quick dopamine reward system.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Whereas TikTok and that short form, it's able to optimize for whatever... whatever gives you that little bit of dopamine in your reinforcement pathways. And because there's a behavior response loop, which you didn't have with television, with television, you could raise the volume, lower the volume, or change the channel. That's it. Those were your options.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
There was not like a feedback loop where the television is rewarding you for certain actions. Whereas what TikTok pioneered is we don't care who you know. We only care what makes you pause, what makes you click, what makes you react. So TikTok is basically, if BF Skinner could come back to life, you know, one of the founders of behaviorism, and observe TikTok, he'd say, this is brilliant.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
This is so brilliant.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
Yeah, exactly. Variable rewards. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So we have to go back before humans because the brains change very slowly. And whatever was built in by the time you get to mammals and primates is the basic architecture of our minds. So we have a reinforcement system which has worked really, really well for other animals. And it is, when certain things happen,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
when there are signals that this is advancing your evolutionary project, which is survive, eat, have sex, leave offspring. So if something happens, you're making progress towards, say, finding a mate. you get a reward and it feels good. And that doesn't make you say, oh, I got my reward, I'm done.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
The way dopamine works is the neurons, I think it's in the nucleus accumbens is one of the main reward areas. Those circuits that use dopamine, the dopamine says, oh, that was good, keep going, get more. And that's why potato chips are the way they are, because you don't eat one and say, oh, that was good. You eat one and say, now I want one more than I wanted the first one.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
So this worked really well for other animals. And by the time you get to humans, that's what we're stuck with is this, it's very much based on a few kind of, a few sort of imperatives. But another thing which is a little more uniquely human is the need for reputation. And so chimpanzees do have a whole lot going on about status. I mean, so these systems go back before humans.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And status is life or death. It certainly is among males, especially, it's who gets to mate. So maintaining high status is extremely important. And we certainly see this in adolescents. Adolescents are, they would gladly do something that knocked a few years off of their life at the end of their life if they could be more popular today. Again, it's the short term.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
We've got to do the thing that seems so imperative to us now, and that's reputation. So we have so you know, I guess, Dave, you started off that I'm something about evolutionary biology. Yeah, I love evolution. It is it's like, it's like, what is the what is the design manual for humans? And then it's customizable. But what is the design manual?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
And so once you start looking at things like, you know, reward reputation, you know, we like outdoor spaces that look like savannas and golf course, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff you can learn from evolution. And then you can understand what some of these guys hacked. And we have actually Chamath, I think is one of the ones who talked to, there's a great quote.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jonathan Haidt | The All-In Interview
I think I might even, you know what? I think I even quote him in the book. There's all, you know, a lot of the guys who were in there early, they could see, they could see exactly what was being done to hack into young people's concerns for their reputation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Yeah. College students overwhelmingly want to be exposed to different ideas. But what I'm arguing is that since the great transformation, since everything became digital, Jeff Jarvis has a book called The Gutenberg Print, a really good book. There was a period, 500 years, that was based on print, text, the Gutenberg era. That ended right around 2014.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
2014 is when you get the first global cancellation, that woman who told a bad joke on Twitter and then she was fired by the time she landed in South Africa. Yes. That was not possible in 2010. You could ruin your life in three minutes. That's right. Because the super viral dynamics of our planet have changed everything and what it is to live within a college. Not our community colleges.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
It wasn't just 10 or 12. It was like the top one or 200. Generally pervasive at our elite schools was if you say something, it could be the end of your social life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
One of my friends, a woman who ran Heterodox Academy for a while, one of her students said to her, my motto is silence is safer. And to be a college student, have that be your motto? There's a real problem with the culture. And since people often felt that at work and they felt it in many environments, I think that's part of what led to the general shift away from the Democrats.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
What I think is so important in the election results is the fact that the shift from Democrats to Republicans happened in almost every group, including Asians, Black men at least, Jews. Every group shifted. And that means there's a pervasive problem. That's what the Coddling the American Mind was about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
That's what so much of my work has been about since 2004 was trying to say, look, Democrats, you need to understand moral psychology. You need to understand why it is that most people care about immigration in ways that you don't. Why it is that people care about family and tradition.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But let's go through the timing. There was a time when that was true. So I was born in 1963. It just blows my mind that when I was born, it was legal to discriminate against black people in a large part of the country. I mean, that was written as a law. Let's go decade by decade. 1973, the change is unbelievable. The legal change. Now you've got the women's rights movement.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
The gay rights movement has started. environmentalism, animal rights. You keep going, 83, even though you have Ronald Reagan as president, socially, the country is still, you know, the advances in acceptance of every possible group. Go to 1993, even more so. By 2013, when I turned 50, our first black president has been reelected. Gay marriage, it's been legalized in many states.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Supreme Court's about to rule on it. Trans rights are coming into view, and those are quickly recognized by the Supreme Court. And so in 2013, if you are a young progressive, You should look back on this history of when marginalized people used to have to be quiet or stay in the margins. And you should say, wow, what incredible progress every decade since 1963.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Whatever we're doing in America, let's keep doing it because it's amazing. That's not what happened. That's exactly when an element of the left became much more radicalized. And you can see it in graphs. You can see that it's young white people on the left, especially, suddenly moved way to the left on issues of race and immigration, way to the left of black people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And it was especially young women. So that's the movement that was radicalized by the internet. Tumblr, I think, was a major place where a lot of these... ideas came together about identity. The 2010s was a really interesting, transformative, and in many ways, terrible time. It began with our sense that this technology is magical. It's going to be the best thing that ever happened to democracy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
The Arabs sprang, Occupy Wall Street. We were all so optimistic about it in the 2010s. We didn't understand what it was doing to us. And I think it really did in the Democrats because it led to a set of ideas that were intense, that led to a lot of intimidation. That's what the Kotlin American mind was about, the intimidation. And that led to a huge backlash.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
It was 2018 after my previous book, The Calling of the American Mind.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Yes, seven years ago.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And that was not possible before social media. You couldn't have a small number intimidating a large number, but now you can. You know, James Carville has been great on this. He's been complaining about faculty lounge politics. Because you say you haven't met a single person. Like, they're all over universities. Not a majority. Most professors are on the left, but they're liberal, they're sane.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But there are certain departments in which this way of thinking is dominant. This sort of thinking is very aggressive and intimidating. A small group ended up having so much power, and that couldn't have happened before social media.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
I was busy studying moral and political psychology. I was going to write a book called Three Stories About Capitalism and the Moral Psychology of Economic Life. And then all of a sudden things blew up on universities in 2015. It began as a side project. What's going on with young people? Why are they so anxious? And that led us to write The Coddling of the American Mind.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Coddling means overprotection. And that led me to draw much more on Lenore Skenazy's work. Now, I'd moved to New York in 2011 with my wife. Our kids were very young then. We met Lenore socially and we read her book, Free Range Kids. And so we used that to help us raise our kids. And I know you and Kristen, I read that amazing story about you guys at Tivoli Gardens. I want you to tell that story.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Oh, no, no, no. I don't know that I have.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Lenore and others have been saying for years, we are vastly overprotecting our kids. So I'm 62, you're like 50. Wait, Monica, if I may ask, are you a millennial? I'm millennial, yeah. 37. So older millennials and up, we almost all had free range childhoods. Now we grew up during a crime wave. There was a lot of crime in the 70s and 80s. But kids went out to play.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
It was like, of course you're going to go out and play. What are you going to do? Sit and watch TV all day long? In the 90s, the crime wave ends. Life gets much safer. Drunk driving gets under control. But that's exactly the decade when we freak out about child abduction. I mean, people literally, now they won't Let their seven-year-old go two aisles over in the grocery store.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Because what if they're kidnapped in the grocery store? It was clear that the overprotection had something to do with this. But the overprotection was kind of gradually implemented in the 80s and 90s. And the mental health crisis hit suddenly in 2012, 2013. So there was something missing from our analysis in the column.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So in the United States, we have several long running, very good nationally representative studies. Most countries don't have this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
one of the ones that a lot of us rely on is called the monitoring the future study it began with just high school seniors not every high school senior but they had i don't know if they identified a few hundred high schools a few thousand high schools so it began just high school seniors that asked them a bunch of questions including i feel anxious every day i can't remember what the phrasing is but here's one of them that i remember the phrasing of is i feel that my life is useless and roughly nine percent of them agreed with that statement plus or minus a bit from the 90s through 2010 so
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So we have this long running, it goes back to the 70s, and then they added in 8th and 10th graders sometime in the 90s. So we have these long running data sets, 8th, 10th, and 12th graders. And so we can see, one of them is, sometimes I like to do things just because they're a little bit dangerous. Teenagers are risk takers. And so the boys, especially, say yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So we can plot how did that question fare? And what we find is on the question about uselessness, Only 9% on a five-point scale either strongly agree or agree. So most American high school students are like, no, I don't feel my life is useless. All of a sudden, 2013, it starts skyrocketing and it doubles within about five or seven years.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So about 20% of our high school seniors think that their life is useless. Data sets like this are full of slow rises and slow falls. You almost never find elbows. You almost never find a hockey stick. And this is what you see in chapter one of The Anxious Generation. Graph after graph, you find a hockey stick, especially for girls. I should make it clear.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
For girls, it's like there's no sign of a problem. And in 2012, boom, more than a doubling, between 50 and 150%, depending on what you're studying. But it's never 10 or 20% increase. It's always 50 to 150% increase. Boys are doing much worse too, but that's a little more gradual. It's not exactly 2012. It begins maybe a little before 2010, but it accelerates in the 2010s.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Yeah, it was one of my best conversations ever because we're sort of similar to each other in a lot of ways. But then we had this like fight and then we buried the hatchet.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So something went suddenly very wrong in the early 2010s. And that's what the anxious generation is about. It's not just the overprotection. It's also, I argue, the change in the technology.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Right. So this was.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
a true moral panic that's an important word a moral panic they have certain properties it spreads through the media people read a report about something then they get afraid the definition of a moral panic includes that it's not real if there really was a sudden wave of kidnappings by men in white vans well then it would be rational to fear it the fbi stats on kidnapping are astonishing any idea how many kids get kidnapped by a stranger any year like ballpark what do you think it is in america in america by a stranger not a family member because those are high yeah
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Two things. One is on the true kidnappings. It's in the ballpark of one or 200 cases a year. So the point is, it's very, very rare in the real world. Now, once we move to online, and this is what's so insane about what's happening. Parents are afraid to let their kids run around outside because they're afraid they'll get picked up by a sex predator. The sex predators are all on Instagram.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
That's where they move. They're too busy. Because they can contact people anonymously. They can groom them and then sometimes they can arrange to meet them. Or once you get a naked photo of a kid, now you've got power over them. You can make him or her do anything you want on camera for you and your body. I mean, it's sick what's happening. Yes, yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
If we're focusing on online, I don't think it's a moral panic. The data from an insider at Instagram, Arturo Bejar, he found, I think it was something like one in seven teens reported some kind of inappropriate sexual contact, like somebody trying to hit on them, pick them up. One in seven. Every week. Oh my God.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
You know, it's hard to know what the exact numbers are, but the point is it's much more dangerous online than in the real world. So we grossly overreacted. And here's what we've learned about why did we freak out in the 90s just as things were getting safe? And the answer is that that's when we stopped trusting our neighbors. The key work here is Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
In the 50s and 60s, we had very, very high social capital in America. We trusted our neighbors. And back then, there were men going around. My sister, when she was a teenager, a man stopped in his car and opened the door and he was naked and masturbating. Yeah. And it was just like, that stuff just happened. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But by the 90s, that guy would be locked away for 20 years.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So back when there were actually more risks, we trusted our neighbors. We let our kids out and some bad stuff happened to them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
They're not a stranger. That's right. And the fact that it was often in institutions, whether it be the Catholic Church or sports teams or Boy Scouts. So that was a huge advance was to say, look, all these organizations, they have some bad apples and then they cover up. That's what they're really guilty of. And that all came out in the 90s.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And so in a sense, that was a legitimate reason to think like, whoa, this is much broader than we thought. But at the same time, crime and danger was plummeting then. And we didn't really pick up on that. But it's that we lost trust in our neighbors. And one way we can see this is the same. Same thing happens in Canada and the UK where they don't have the high crime rates that we do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And so it's just around the Anglosphere, we change, we spend all our time on television, we don't know our neighbors, and we lose trust.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Moral dumbfounding. Dumbfounding. That's the word. They're fun. They're good party tricks. Yeah. Do you have a favorite? Because we have a favorite. So there's the brother-sister incest story. Yeah, we love that. It's solid. Yeah. And then there's the eating your pet dog story. Those are really the two that are... Tell us that one. Oh, okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
What I'm coming to see is that you have to keep your eye on technology because technology changes so fast. And then the downstream effects of technology are so vast. So the arrival of television had huge effects. Then television going to cable with hundreds of channels has huge effects. And then microcasting and then cable to social media, micro microcasting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
I see that you have Yuval Noah Harari's book on your shelf, Nexus, in there. He says often democracy is a conversation. Well, what happens when that conversation moves on to Twitter? It becomes much more polarizing and disparate and fragmented. So, yes, that's what we're talking about here, the way that technology changes everything about our political lives. But to return to the children. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So we knew that overprotection was a piece of the story, but it couldn't explain this incredibly sudden sharp turn up around 2013 in many, many countries. And so in the coddling, we had about a page or two where we said, no. Social media really comes in around the right time. Facebook opens up to the world around 2007.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Maybe that influenced what we then knew was Gen Z. And especially around 2011, 2012, it gets much more viral. So we speculated, you know, maybe it has some, but we don't know. Well, that was what we wrote in 2017. And after the book came out, some researchers challenged me and said, oh, you can't say it's social media. There's no evidence. I said, really?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Wait, I saw all kinds of studies that did show at least a correlation, a couple of experiments. So I started gathering all the studies I could find in these big Google documents. You go to anxiousgeneration.com slash reviews. You can find all these Google documents where we collect all the evidence on one side, all the evidence on the other. We organize it by method.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So you can get a sense like, okay, what is the nature of the research that's out there? And as I began to see that actually the correlational studies are pretty consistent. There are some that show no correlation, but those tend to be all digital media for all kids with all kinds of outcomes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Every time you zoom in on just social media for girls, anxiety and depression, you find a much bigger correlation. The second is that there are now about 25 experiments where you randomly assign people, usually college students. It's hard to work with 12-year-olds. Weirdest people on earth. That's right. The weirdest people on earth. That's right. Famous article.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So the background here is that I was studying moral psychology as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. And the big debate was, is moral judgment driven by gut feelings? Which the philosopher David Hume had said,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But where you randomly assign people to get off social media. And if you look just at the studies that kept them off for more than a week, almost all of them find benefits on measures of anxiety and depression. And so once you have correlational studies and you have experimental studies and you have eyewitness testimony, because Gen Z generally says this is harming them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
It's very hard to find members of Gen Z who are saying, no, social media is great. We love it. It's good for us. And we have confessions from the companies. On my sub stack after Babbel, we have an article, TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale using just their own words from the lawsuits against them. We know some of their internal memos and correspondence, just their own words.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
They know they're harming millions and millions of kids a year.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Oh my God, that's right. Chinese kids get spinach all about how great China is and how to be an astronaut. And we get fentanyl and dog poop.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
No, I'm the last of the baby boomers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Roughly 1981 through 1995. Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And that's Monica.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And then Gen Z is from? I say 1996. Pew says 1997. Who knows? You can't say, but roughly 1996. Gene Twenge says 1995. So if you're born in the mid nineties or later, you are Gen Z. And what I came to see is the key thing is look at early puberty. If you were born in 1995, last of the millennials, you're turning 15 in 2010. You probably had a flip phone. You didn't have Instagram. in 2010.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And you might've traded in later, but the point is you made it most of the way through puberty before the great transformation, before the great wiring. And you didn't get this stuff until really more like college. Your mental health is probably fine. But if you were born in the year 2000, you turned 15 in 2015. And so your first phone might well have been a smartphone.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And the iPhone gets a front facing camera in 2010. And Instagram comes out in 2010, but Facebook buys it in 2012. That's when everyone goes on it. If you were born in the year 2000, you went through early puberty as a girl, especially on Instagram with your phone in your hand. Half of our teenagers say they are online almost constantly, phones always in their hand.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
in which I was leaning towards, or is it driven more by reasoning about the facts of the matter, especially about harm, as Lawrence Kohlberg was the dominant researcher at the time. And since I'd been studying how morality varies across cultures, it just seemed like morality is about the body. And I ended up doing some research in India and reading a lot about Hinduism.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And that I believe is what created Gen Z. That's why Gen Z is different from the millennials is what were they doing in early puberty?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
I mean, I was always just thinking about Gen Z, but we don't know when Gen Alpha begins. Marketers tell us 2010 or 2011. I think it might actually depend more on TikTok. I think TikTok is transformative for brain development. And so it might be that the generation shaped by TikTok is very different. But for now, we're going with 2010. Let's say 2011 is the first birth year of Gen Alpha.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Neural networks are amazing things. I was thinking going into AI in 1986 when I was done with college and I was working in computers. And AI back then was based on programming normal computer language to do things and it didn't get very far. It's only once they develop the idea that, hey, how about we make something like a neural network? And then you train it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And of course, we all know the training data needed to train chat GPT is enormous. And the stuff you put in is going to shape the connections made. So what happens when the stuff that gets put into our neural network is the stuff that we evolved for, which is fantastic.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
First, you learn how to move your body, and then you learn to walk and run and eye contact and social life and talking and climbing and fleeing predators and forming coalitions and all the stuff that you have to learn. And you watch kids. It's amazing. They'll do something. It falls down. They do it again. It falls down. They do it again. I mean, they repeat, repeat, repeat. They've got no quit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Although now, if you give a kid an iPad, they might say, fuck that, this is too interesting. I'm staying on the iPad.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Yeah, that's right. So my point is that brain development takes a very, very long time. Humans have an extraordinarily long childhood. And the only way that we could have such a long childhood is if it was incredibly valuable because evolution is a battle for survival. Why would you delay reproduction by so long? Culture is very, very powerful, very important to learn.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And so we've evolved cultural mechanisms of cultural learning. And we still use this. We look not just to our parents. We look at all the adults. No child has their parents' accent. They have the accent of the people around them. So we can live in modern ways, but you still have to have this pathway of child development. Now, what happens when we now give kids iPhones and iPads?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
I'd always been interested in Hinduism. I'd always been interested in travel. And it just seemed like American or Western morality was just much more cerebral and divorced from the body. I wanted to make up a bunch of stories that would hit you in the gut immediately. And then you'd reach for evidence of harm and it's not there. What do you do? Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
In Britain, there's a shocking statistic. One quarter of their five-year-olds have their own smartphone because parents around the world have discovered your kid's crying, you need to make dinner, take the phone, you're happy, I'm happy, I can do my stuff. And it's like drugging your kid.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
A distinction I'm coming to see, which is very, very useful, is I don't want to tell people, be afraid of screens, never let your kid on a screen. What I'm coming to see as I talk with my undergrads, especially, and I realize how serious the attention fragmentation is. This is, I think, ultimately more serious than the mental illness is the attention fragmentation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So I'm coming to see that distinguish between story time and fragmenting time. So stories are good things. Humans are storytelling animals. We love stories. All cultures tell stories. That's part of how we socialize our kids. And that's why literature is so important and why reading novels is so important. Stories are good.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And a television screen is actually a pretty good way of portraying a story. So don't be afraid of letting your kids have story time. They're not six hours a day, but on a plane ride, let your kid watch a movie. Fantastic. But fragmenting time is I'm doing this thing, but then I get a pop up. I do this other thing. I'm watching this movie, but I'm a little bored, so I'll check out this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Oh, and I'll go there. And so if you give a kid an iPad, that's fragmenting time. How much fragmenting time should you give your kid? As close to zero as possible forever. But don't be afraid of stories.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Kids are incredibly sociable, social. We socialize each other. We play in groups, mixed age groups. There's clear data on how much time kids were spending with friends until around 2010, 2012, about two hours a day on average. It's called the American Time Use Survey. How much time did you spend eating? How much time did you spend watching TV?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So you can see until around 2012, kids 15 to 24 is the youngest age group. They were spending about two hours a day with their friends outside of school and work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And then you see this incredibly sharp drop around 2012 in that period, down to the point where in 2019, just before COVID, it's gone from two hours a day down to like 45 minutes a day, which is just a little bit more than older people are spending. And then COVID comes in, we get COVID restrictions and it just goes down a little further.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Gen Z began practicing social distancing as soon as they got a smartphone. And they finished the job almost by 2019 and then certainly by 2020. Because with a phone, you're always interrupted. It's always more interesting than the person standing next to you. And my students complain, like you sit with somebody at lunch in the cafeteria and they're on their phone half the time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And so it just fragments, it disrupts. There's a great line in the book from Sherry Turkle at MIT. She says, with our phones, we are forever elsewhere. And so this is devastating to socialism. development. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And so the first story I made up, a family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious. So they cut up the dog's body and they cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this. What do you think? Was it okay for them to eat their dog? Yeah. Let me just first ask you, what's your first reaction, Monica?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
We're damaging our relationships. We're not damaging our brains.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But that leads right into the second foundational harm, which is attention fragmentation. And this is the one that I'm beginning to think is possibly the most serious. The book focused on on mental illness because we have good data about that. We don't have good data on attention fragmentation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But in talking with my students, and these are students who got into a top university at New York University, some of them say they can't watch a movie. And some of them say, or they have friends who can't watch a movie unless they're also on a second screen because they can't focus on anything for that long. They can't read a book.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
One of my students said, I take out a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok. What is the cost to humanity if half of our kids can't read a book?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Yeah, I hear that argument occasionally. Like, well, the technology is here to stay. They need to learn how to use it. So they should start early. You know, I mean, sex is here to stay, but we're not going to start our kids at six or seven. Let them have normalcy. There's a time for it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
What I would say as a college professor is if you want to send your kids to me at NYU Stern, a business school, or preparing for these sorts of careers you're talking about, and I could choose between kids who had an iPhone or iPad from age five and were always on it and can use the technology but can't think, can't focus, can't write, can't look you in the eye.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
I mean, how are you going to succeed in business? Right. If, on the other hand, I could get kids who were raised in a homeschooled Christian environment, they had no technology until they were 18. I suppose they were going to come to college. They're going to pick up how to use the technology in about three days.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
That's right. The millennials in the 90s, your generation, you guys grew up with the Internet, but you learned how to program what a motherboard is and swapping in chips. I mean, there was learning before, but now these things are so easy to use and they're designed to be addictive. The early Internet was not designed to be addictive. It was designed to be useful. So, no, I reject that argument.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
It's much, much better to let healthy brain development at least get most of the way through before you shatter it with the constant interruptions and fragmenting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Well, and that brings us right to another of the foundations, which is addiction. And this is one that we mentioned in the book, but I'm coming to see is much more serious than I realized. So yes, let's talk about addiction a bit. Finally wandered into my field of expertise, addiction. Okay. All right. So I'll interview you about it. The key neural process here is, of course, dopamine.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Dopamine is sometimes said to be a neurotransmitter of reward, but it's not reward like I did something, I get a reward. There's no satiation. Exactly. It's the opposite of satiation. It's really more a neurotransmitter of motivation. You do something, it feels good. And your brain says, oh, that felt good. Let's do it again. which in our ancestral environment was good.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Like you taste something like, ooh, it tastes sweet. Let's have more and more and more. Grab it all.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
That's the key word is deficit. So I'm now studying educational technology because our schools are stuffed full of ed tech and a lot of it is gamified. Hey, let's teach kids math. Let's make it a fun game where they get rewards. If you do that, you'll get more engagement, but there's a cost. The more activities we give our kids that lead them to quick dopamine, which is you do
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Do something simple, you get a reward. Do something simple, get a reward. Like a slot machine, like social media, you never know what's going to come, but sometimes it's good. If you gamify a quarter of a kid's day, that's a lot of quick dopamine. The brain is going to react by down-regulating dopamine neurons so that they're less sensitive to dopamine.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And so now when you take away the gamification, now they're in a deficit state, which means everything is boring and unpleasant.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Not on everything, but on anything that involves dopamine.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
If you think about what you might call quick dopamine versus slow dopamine. So slow dopamine is, suppose a boy sets out to build a treehouse or a racing car. Every time it makes progress, that's rewarding. But you're going towards the goal. You're keeping focused. Now, this is what executive function is. Executive function is the ability to say, here's my goal. I'm going to do the hard work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Along the way, I get rewards for making progress. And when I'm done, it feels so good. Yeah, delayed gratification. That's right. So that's all really good. But what I'm coming to see is I underestimated what's happening to boys because I focus more on the girls because the data is just so much clearer on social media and girls.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But with boys, they get the video games early and the video games are so much better than what I had. We had Pong. I would like the first video game. It was kind of fun. ColecoVision, I think. That's right. Atari, Asteroid. The boys, it starts with the video games, which is really quick dopamine. It's incredibly intense. They're beautiful. They're exciting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And many parents have observed once they let their boy play video games and a little bit is okay. I don't want to cause a panic here on video games, but if your kid is playing three hours of video games a day, seven days a week, probably that's going to have dopamine effects because they're in a state of deficit. And so everything else is more boring. Then we have to ramp it up. Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
They're in school. They're bored. Let's give them gamified math. And we'll get them to gamify this and that. And oh, let's let them keep their phones on them, which is insane. A study just came out from Dimitri Kostakis. On average, American students, I think it was high school, spend an hour and a half a day in school on their phone.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Again, if you gamify, gamify, gamify, then the rest of life is incredibly boring. And that includes talking to people. We're really doing our kids a disservice. Oh, and then I haven't even mentioned the vaping and the marijuana pens and the crypto gambling and sports betting. You get the sense from my book that the girls are in worse shape than the boys, but I'm realizing that's not true.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
At age 14, the girls are in worse shape because the boys have these amazing video games. They've got incredible porn. They're enjoying their dopamine-filled pursuits, but I think they're harming their brains more even than the girls are. Which helps explain why girls are making progress career wise. Boys are increasingly living at home with their parents because they're less suited for employment.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
If you have any influence, try to roll this back. It's insane that this has been legalized. This is just fishing. for boys dopamine circuits. Richard Reeves wrote of boys and men. He told me that when sports betting is legalized in a state, the number of bankruptcies goes up very quickly. And that's mostly young men. And so we're just destroying young men and their futures.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Maybe a show like The Good Place.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Sleep is so important. We're realizing much more now than we did 20 years ago. Because when I was in college, it was like, we don't really know why people sleep. All animals sleep, but when you keep people up at night, they don't die. It was known for a long time that REM sleep does have something to do with consolidating memory. So there's always been a relationship between sleep and learning.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
We know that. But more recently, I don't remember when this was found, but there's a lymphatic system in our bodies that gets rid of broken molecules and proteins and flushes it out. The brain does not have a lymphatic system to flush it out. But deep sleep seems to involve a pattern of neural firing that seems to do some of that. And so it is about the brain's repair.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Sleep is incredibly important. It's also important for your mental health. So we know that once you give kids, touchscreen devices are the most engaging, the most addictive, much more so than a television screen. Television is entertaining, but it doesn't allow you to do stimulus response stuff, whereas a touchscreen does.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So if you give a kid an iPad or an iPhone and you let them have it at night in their room, Not all, but a lot of them are going to be on it instead of sleeping. And so there's the blue light, there's the stimulation, there's the social drama. And so a lot of kids are now really sleep deprived. Now what happens? You're sleep deprived. You go into class. You can't learn as much.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
You do more poorly in school. You're more stressed out by your grades. You're irritable and short tempered. So your relationships suffer. And all of this just creates a loop where you become more and more depressed and dysfunctional. So just to go through the four, it's social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Those are the four big effects.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So if you give your kid a smartphone or an iPad that they can hold on to, Your kid is at risk for these four things. Again, I'm not saying never give them an iPad, but if they have it, it's their own. They can customize it, especially if they get social media accounts. Now they've got so much stuff coming in.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Wait, are you saying that if it was healthy? Right. As opposed to enjoyable? A superfood. A superfood. Why would that?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Yeah, I think it's both. But I think it's especially the latter. That is the contagion effect. So here's the way to look at it. There've been these, they were called dance plagues or dance fevers. You find reports in throughout the middle ages in Europe and people would begin dancing and they would dance to exhaustion. Some people would die.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And it was primarily young women who are susceptible to this. Now, one thing we know about boys and girls, girls are just more socially aware. So girls are more open to influence from other girls, especially. It's been over a long time. So what happens when you give everybody a flip phone and they can text each other, but you're only texting your friends? Not much. That's actually pretty good.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And that's why the millennials' mental health didn't plunge. Talking on the phone is great. Texting is not as good because it's not synchronous, but it's not bad just with your friends. But what happens by 2015? Actually, let's look at 2013 when this all starts. Everyone's trading in their flip phone for a smartphone. They're getting off of Facebook on their parents' computer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And now they've got Instagram on their own phone. And now they're communicating not just with one friend, but with groups of friends. So it's more display. Oh, and then you start working in strangers and friends of friends. And before you know it, you're getting into these interest groups or you're following an influencer group on YouTube or much later on TikTok.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Why is it that anxiety, why is there this sharp elbow for the girls but not the boys? Why is it that in 2012, it's like someone flipped a light switch and the girls instantly, in many countries, start checking into hospital emergency rooms more often? That's not true for boys. So I think that's the contagion. If you expose young girls who already are susceptible to social influence,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
more so than older women or than teenage boys. You super connect them by a thing driven by an algorithm based in Menlo Park, California, which is going to feed you the things that it has concluded are most likely to keep you on. And that is girls and young women showing extreme dieting behaviors and get ready with me videos.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And here's how to make your lips bigger or whatever, all the stuff that it is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So more and more extreme for girls' socialization and more and more extreme on political extremity.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
This is why everything is so crazy now. Because we super... connected ourselves. You know, we always thought connection was good. Hey, should we build roads to connect cities and have trade? Yes, let's do that. Should we have a postal service? Yes, let's do that. Of course, there are always problems, but the net effect is always enormously positive.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
This, I think, might be the first one where it's enormously negative. Again, connecting by individual communication, fine, but it's the algorithm-driven... Is this a good idea to have our kids talking with strangers at the age of 10 and 11?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Well, wait, hold on. I tend to say the rates have risen between 50 and 150 percent because this particular study asked the question in this way of this age group. So I can't give you a flat number. All I can say is that the numbers are generally between 50 and 150 percent. I can also say that the over 100 numbers, those are. are almost exclusively from preteen girls.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
If we look at girls 10 to 14, we often find more than 100% increase, sometimes 200. Self-harm is actually three or 400% increase. But if we're talking about older teens, we tend not to get over 100%. It tends to be sometimes 40%, more like 50 to 80%, generally speaking.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Ask me about destigmatization. Please say, John, isn't some of it just destigmatization? Okay, great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Thank you, Monica. So we can put all these things together because I get this a lot. So look, I said a lot of things in the book. There's been almost no pushback on any of it except for two topics. One is, is there really mental health crisis? And two, is it caused by social media? Those are the two areas of academic debate. On the first one, is there really a mental health crisis?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Almost everybody says it's wrong to eat your dog because it's like family, you have a relationship. The only exception is highly educated Westerners who do have a more harm-based morality and who do say, well, you know, it was their dog, they have a right to do it. Causing suffering, that would be terrible, but the dog's already dead.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Isn't this just destigmatization? Isn't it just that Gen Z is comfortable talking about this? Oh, and they know all these words for it. It's the cultural capital of the day, in a sense. Yeah, isn't that all it is? That's a perfectly good argument. We should ask that about any disease.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But so my mother sent me to a couple of psychologists in the mid-70s because I had various nervous tics and they seemed like nervous habits. But that was very shameful. And I wouldn't tell anyone that I'd been to see a variety of therapists in the 70s. Yeah. And then, you know, in the 80s and 90s, it begins to be much more destigmatized. We start talking about it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
There are television shows about it. And so the destigmatization has been going steadily from the 70s to today. So why was there no change in any of these measures from the late 90s through 2011? There's no change. And all of a sudden, boom.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But was it experienced as a release? Like, oh, finally, like in 2010, we couldn't talk about this, but now they're all on Instagram by 2013, 2014. Oh, now we can talk about it. Is it that? Or is it that we transitioned from stigmatizing it to destigmatizing, destigmatizing, destigmatizing? To incentivizing. Exactly. At a certain point, it becomes prestigious. It's social capital.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And that is a terrible thing to do to kids, especially to girls. And that's what I think happened. Yeah, that's fair. The last thing you want to do to girls is say you'll get more prestige if you have more extreme symptoms.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
One person said in my study, well, I guess in a way it's recycling, and so that's good. Sustainability. Yeah, sustainable dog farming. Yeah. So the point is, around the world, most people think that if you're revolted by something, that disgust contains some knowledge, some wisdom about borders where you shouldn't cross. Except for educated Westerners, especially those on the left.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Sure. Who's saying what? We've made great progress.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
An interesting finding about all this research, a lot of this research is done with my research partner, Zach Rausch. You graph all these studies by both religiosity and by politics. So on the Monitoring the Future study, one of the questions is, religion is important in my family. Do you agree strongly, agree a little? So five points go.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And when you break it up by those who agreed strongly or weakly versus those who disagreed, you find is that the secular families, the kids, they go up sharply, whereas the religious families, they go up just a little. So they were somewhat protected. And we find the same thing for politics. Seniors in high school, they added the question on politics in the 90s.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So you can see if you say that you're liberal, you go up a lot. But if you say you're conservative, you go up just a little.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And so part of what's happening here is that people that are deeply anchored in a community of adults that is a moral community with an order that is binding, where you have obligations and duties and you have to do these rituals or visit your grandmother, you weren't just washed out to sea. On Instagram, we know that liberal girls use social media the most. They simply spend more hours on it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And the stuff they're consuming is a lot of victimhood stuff. They're consuming a lot of really disempowering ideas about how the world is against you and you're going to have all these problems and there's so much sexism. It's really liberal girls, especially secular liberal girls,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
As soon as they moved on to Instagram, they're the ones who got much more depressed and anxious, or at least that's where it was concentrated. And so I think it is some of these ideas about victimhood that became so popular on campus in the 2010s that are disempowering.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
They have a much narrower morality based primarily around harm and especially protection of the vulnerable. So, okay, now I'll give you the more advanced one. There's a guy who's a vegetarian for moral reasons. He thinks it's wrong to kill animals. He works at a hospital in a pathology lab where they prepare cadavers for dissection.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
I would agree with that. From my book, The Righteous Mind, the subtitle is Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. And the analysis that I give there is that we evolved as tribal creatures. The key that religion does for us is actually creates a community. So I follow a sociologist, Emile Durkheim, is my favorite thinker of all time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
He said the purpose of a religion is to create, to bind together a group in a moral order that then constrains us. And we can find meaning and connection within that. And when you don't have that constraint, when you can do whatever you want, that's the state he called anomie or normlessness. And that I think is part of what hit
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
A lot of kids in the early 2010s, there's no clear guide for anything. The hedonic treadmill. And if it's just getting pleasure and then you adapt. And so that's why I think we see that finding that I told you about earlier, which is all of a sudden my life feels useless. And it goes from 9% to about 20% of American teenagers are agreeing because their lives are useless.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
All they're doing is consuming content.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
The day you give your kid a touchscreen device, a smartphone or an iPad is the day that that will become the most interesting thing for him or her. It's like having BF Skinner in a box because it can show you something and then you behave, you get rewarded. So it can train you much more than a television ever could. And of course, they're going to have those eventually.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But I'm trying to say, let's clear it out of middle school. I'm really interested and focused, especially on early puberty. So we're on 11 to 13. Let's clear it out of that. The key to the four norms is that they're all collective solutions. It's really hard for a parent to say, no, sweetie, you can't have a smartphone. I'm going to give
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
You're the only kid. The other kids are going to make fun of you. You're going to be left out. So that's a very painful choice and most parents don't make it. And so it ends up that all the kids have a smartphone. It's now going down into elementary school. So your girls are how old now? 10 and 12. Do they have any kind of phone?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
One day there's a fresh corpse which recently died, good condition, but they have no need for it, so he's supposed to put it in the incinerator. He decides that he'd like to try meat, so he cuts off a section of the thigh and disposes the rest of the body and breathes. What do you think about that one?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
It does not happen. Tell me what they do after school and on weekends. Are they seeing friends or are they in after school programs the whole time?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Are there any other kids that they're doing this with or are they the only free range kids and everyone else is overprotected?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Fantastic. Do they see them on a weekly basis? They see them nonstop. That's it. Okay, good. So let me return to the four norms and then we'll come back to this because the way to break out of this trap where we've got 10 year olds wasting their lives away, scrolling through TikTok and Instagram, four norms, no smartphone before high school.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Just give them a flip phone, a basic phone, a phone watch, let them text with their friends. No social media before 16. Social media is wildly inappropriate for kids. Sex, the violence, the addiction, the drug sales on Snap and other things. Third norm is phone-free schools. It's completely insane. When we were kids, you couldn't bring your television into class and watch TV during class.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Yeah, that's right. With your TiVo and electric guitar and everything else. So it's phone-free schools. That's got to happen. It's happening fast. It's going to happen here in California statewide. Oh, that's great. And then the fourth norm is far more independence, responsibility, and freedom in the real world.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
The key is don't just think of this like, oh, I'm going to say no to this and no to that. The key is give your kids a great, exciting social childhood. That's what kids need. And so if your kids have a gang, if they have just a few other kids that they can hang around with, they're probably going to come out fine. So that's what you've done.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
We quote a play expert, Mariana Brussoni, who says about playgrounds, kids need to be kept as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. And I quote a camp administrator who says something like, we want to see bruises, not scars. You know, if you run a camp or if you run a school and no one's ever injured on the playground, you're way too safe and your kids are not having any fun or adventure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
The parents fired you for not letting them go down?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
They shouldn't have fired you. They should have just educated you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
That's right. Especially in America. Yeah. They have all the same problems in Canada and Australia and the UK. So of course you're right. The liability section makes everyone paranoid in this country, especially that is a real problem. But Keeping your eye on having a fun, exciting childhood.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
This is one of the most fun aspects of the book as we go deep in chapter three on play and exploration into research. There's a Norwegian play researcher, Ellen Sandsater. She says there are seven different kinds of thrills, high speeds, great heights, dangerous tools, hiding and getting lost. There are all these risks. And kids are seeking them out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
They're trying to get the right level of it because that's how you train your brain about where the borders are, what you're capable of. That's how you extend your abilities. You definitely want to always do a safety inspection. You want to make sure there's nothing that can kill them. Traffic and then swimming pool. A lot of kids did used to die from drowning. Drowning is serious.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
You need to be very careful about drowning. But climbing a tree and falling out and getting scraped up or possibly breaking an arm, that's something that should be a feature, not a bug, that there are risks.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
What you're doing here is you're recapitulating The exact thing we started with about does moral judgment come from your gut or from your head and your calculations? Am I the elephant or the rider? You are the rider. The rider is the small, the little.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Wow, the world is so weird.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Right. The gut response is why should you take any risk? Whereas if you think about it, you realize, wait, if I don't train my child how to take risk, I'm crippling this child. I am creating a child that won't be able to deal with the world. And that's what we've done.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
That's right. And so here, let me just put in the term anti-fragility, one of the most powerful and important words, a word coined by Nassim Taleb, who's kind of a polymath, interesting, brilliant guy with some affiliation at New York University. And he pointed out there's a need for a word that describes systems that get better when they get challenged or threatened even.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So the immune system is the classic example. If you protect your kid's immune system, you don't let any dirt or germs come in. You're crippling it because the system is designed to learn from the challenges, learn from the dirt and germs that get in. And so it's the same thing here. Kids are antifragile.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And if you treat them like they're fragile, you don't want to take any risks, then you're blocking their development. And just as they'll have autoimmune diseases, if you don't let them be exposed to dirt and germs, they'll have all kinds of psychological and anxiety related disorders if you don't let them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
I guess if you go to jail and you're completely broke and you have this amazing story, it's a pretty clever way to monetize it. France voted, so we know where they landed.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So I see where you're going with those statistical arguments, but I would urge more a vision of a positive life. Imagine your kid in two ways. In one, your kid is competent and confident and they go out there into the world and they're doing things. In the other, they're just always afraid because they think everything's risky. Which one do you want for your kid?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Ah, okay. Because you think what's happening to kids is not that serious.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So where are you going with this, Dax?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Oh, because he didn't have the relationship with the stranger. Yeah. So I'm going to guess that you're on the left politically. I am. Yeah. Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Well, you said they're thriving, right? That's an interesting- Improving. On a lot of the self-destructive metrics, their behavior is better. That's all true. Now, does that mean they're thriving? Why are they not drinking? Why are they not driving cars? Why are they not dating? Why are they not getting pregnant? Why do you think it is? Because they're so wise? They decided, you know what?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
These are risky.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
If you're just on your bed all day long, scrolling through social media, then you're not going to be doing any of those things. So in chapter three of the book, I talk about a psychological dimension of discover mode versus defend mode. And at any moment, our brains are such that we have a very, very quickly triggered reaction. withdrawal, fear, runaway, protect yourself mechanism.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
That's defend mode. And so it's on a hair trigger, any threat, we're in defend mode. We live in very safe worlds and especially college or school is very safe. You want your kids to be in discover mode. You want them to look at something and say, what is that? That's an opportunity, not a threat.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
There's a line from the philosopher Leon Kass, a really brilliant writer on matters of ethics. But he has a line, shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. I spent a year at Princeton in 2007 to 8. It was a really wonderful year. And Kass came and he gave a set of lectures. He considers himself a sort of liberal from the old days.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And what seems to have happened, a succinct way to describe the change from millennials to Gen Z is the millennials were very much in discover mode. They like to have fun. They like to party. They like to dance, be social. They were in discover mode. They had Now, much lower rates of teen pregnancy than previous generations. Gen X, actually, your generation, is actually the sickest in some ways.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
We have the highest suicide rate. Right, because you're the most lead-poisoned. Lead was banned in the late 70s, early 80s. You're the most lead-poisoned. Oh, my God. You are. No, it's serious. It's real. Millennials are the first unleaded generation. You guys were raised at a time when lead was really going down fast.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But leaving that aside, if you imagine a whole generation being shifted from discover mode over to defend mode, you're going to see exactly the list you told me. So sure, they're committing fewer crimes. They're not doing crazy, stupid things. Oh, wait a second. You can find reel after reel of Gen Z influencers who die because they're doing something risky.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
What percent of boys today would you say are free from addiction?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But if we all agree that the central pathway is dopamine, what percent of boys are dependent on external stimuli to give them dopamine? Through video games.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Crypto betting, everything. What percent? I don't know. Each of these, it tends to be somewhere between 5% and 10% develop what's called problematic use. Compulsive, hard to stop, damages other things. I've never seen a stat that lumped it all together because a lot of it is multi-addiction. If you are addicted to one dopamine thing and Lemke says you're more at risk for other dopamine addictions.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So if you add it all up, I don't know. But one thing that we are seeing is that at the upper end of the income, if you look at the richest families, you look at the smartest kids in school, they're often not down very much. But you look at the bottom quarter, whether it's by test scores or by social class, they are dropping much faster, especially for boys. Well, they need more salve.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
They're also the most exposed to digital addictions. They spend more time on their devices. They're more likely to be spending four, five, six hours a day on video games. So sure, you can show me a couple of stats that are down, but I see these as actually symptoms of a much larger malaise, which is the shift over to defend mode.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Oh, you should be aware of all these other threats.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And he feels that things have moved so that he's now on the right. But he is more on sort of the right philosophically. And Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher who is more on the left, he's a brilliant utilitarian philosopher. I love both men. One of the greatest days of my academic life was CASP was giving three talks on three days.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Is she really afraid of digital addictions for your kids?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
It's a moral panic if it's not true. It's a moral panic if this is spread by news reports only. One reason this is not a moral panic is that parents are not responding to the book because they read an article about a kid who got addicted. It's because they've seen it, if not in their own kids, then their nieces and nephews or in their friends' kids. Everyone has seen this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
As you said earlier, Monica, like we see it in ourselves. We can't handle all this stuff.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Exactly. So it's not a moral panic. It is really happening. And this is why the book is doing so well around the world. Whenever it comes out in a country, I don't have to go to the country. Just some parents read it and say, oh my God, yes. Because all over the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. None of us asked for this. We all hate it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
We can see what it's doing to our kids because there is an academic debate as to whether social media is causing it or not. And some people are acting like, well, until we're sure, until we have proof, we shouldn't do anything. When we're talking about kids, it should be the opposite.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
It should be, if there's a credible reason to think that this is harmful, we're not sure yet, maybe, but it looks like it. And the cost of keeping them off for a few years is zero. They're not missing anything if all they have is flip phones. I don't think that this is in any way a moral panic.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
What I'm offering is an explanation of the concerns that are almost universally shared by parents once they see their kids on devices.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
I'm afraid of irrational panics too, but what if it is rational? Let me just make the case this way. So first, let me say, you're in a privileged position in that your kids have a group. Very few kids have a group that they can see socially and have fun with. Your kids are having a normal human childhood.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And I urge that any parents out there that are listening, work as hard as you can to find other kids that your kids can hang out with without supervision. It's very important that they be unsupervised because that's the way that they learn to be self-supervising. So that is fantastic what you're doing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Now, as for whether this is something where we need to respond urgently or maybe this is just kind of a problem and we should study it more and not act hastily, that's, I think, your position.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And there was a lunch at the faculty club and I was visiting as a scholar. And so there's a bunch of us around and it was like Singer on one side, CASP on the other. These two men with completely opposed worldviews. So Singer would say, it's fine on any of these. If you're not harming anyone, that's all there is, is harm to sentient creatures, including animals.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
That is possible. And I'm in the position of saying this time is different. Now, in previous moral panics, people said this time is different too. So I understand that I could be wrong, but I think the effects of this technology, it's especially the touchscreen, the quick stimulus response, and then the super connection, not direct connection, but mediated by algorithm for for-profit companies.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
My argument is this is different. First of all, this is global. That hasn't happened before. This is accompanied by an instant increase in all kinds of mental illness, which didn't happen with television or anything else. This is something that the kids themselves recognize.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
With television, there was a moral panic, but my sisters and I were watching I Dream of Jeannie and the Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy, and we loved it. We had no reservations about it, but Gen Z does. We did a survey. One question is, do you wish this technology had never been invented? And for Instagram, it was 35% say they wish it was never invented.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
For TikTok, 48% say they wish it was never invented. They feel trapped. So this is not like previous moral panics. Secondly, part of the reason I'm rushing with such urgency here that we have to act quickly is that AI is coming in faster than anyone realizes. We think chat GPT, it'll get a little smart. No. The AI friends are coming in. Soon the AI girlfriends will be implanted in robots.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
What's coming at kids is so far beyond what we can imagine. And the principle so far from the early days of the internet, our children are the same as adults. Anyone can be any age on the internet. There is no age. Everyone can do everything. That's been the rule.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
We have more than 100 years of experience in the real world saying, you know, we want adults to be able to drink and smoke, but we don't want kids to be doing it. We want adults to have sex, but we don't want kids to be doing it, you know, with strangers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Driving, right. We've accepted the principle in the real world that kids are not adults. Online, we have not yet accepted that principle. And AI is coming, not five years from now.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
They already have it. So we've already had several encounters with this. We already let social media get to our kids early. And this has been, I believe, a disaster. What's the likelihood that when our kids now have all these AI friends that are so great, so praising, no problems.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
The odds that this is going to be good for them are so slim. That's why I do really feel like a man on a mission that we have to fix this this year, 2025, because by 2026, 27, the AI, the rate of increase, the arrival of artificial general intelligence, the degree to which our lives will be run by agents. So we do have to act quickly. I don't think we can say, well, you know, we need more study.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So I think you're more on the singer side. Yeah. And caste is more beloved by, say, Catholic intellectuals or those who are theorizing about, well, why shouldn't gay people marry? Or there's a lot more than just.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
The proposals that I'm making cost approximately zero dollars. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Yes, there's a chance that I'm wrong. There's a chance that this was actually caused by some weird plastic that was introduced in 2012 all over the world at the same time. It hit girls more than boys. Exactly. So that could be true. I can't be certain that I'm right about this. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Oh, I was excited.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Gen Z was excited. We didn't see protests among Gen Z because they don't want to be the only one kicked off.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But they would like it to disappear.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
They're a pox on humanity. Look at it this way. These companies are worth trillions of dollars collectively. How much money do they make from each of us? How much did you pay them? I paid them zero. Yeah, exactly. So where did the trillions of dollars of value come from? From sucking out our kids' attention and selling it and their data.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Well, thank you, Dax and Monica. It was really fun. The last time we spoke, things have gotten a lot rougher and weirder since 2018. But I think there is a growing awareness of the problems. I have my concerns about the directions of American democracy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
When it comes to what's happening to our kids, what I've seen since the book came out in March makes me so hopeful that around the world, parents and especially mothers are really leading the charge. Parents are rising up saying enough is enough. So I think we are actually going to solve this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Right. Like humanity.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Yeah. If it's in a religious context, it makes sense. If you believe, as most religions do, that we are children of God, we are created by God, we carry some essence inside of us, whether you're Christian or Hindu or Jewish, there's a sense that your body is either on loan or a gift from God. And so you shouldn't act in ways that defile it. Right. Or eat it. Eat God's child. Exactly. God's child.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Exactly. That's right. Treating it like just a piece of meat is defiling it. So if you're in a religious context, it makes perfect sense. And if you're an atheist or secular, it doesn't. And I asked Cass, I was able to talk to him afterwards alone. I said, so do you believe in God? And he said, well, it depends what you mean. You know, as many Jewish intellectuals, I'm Jewish. It's like, well.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Rabbinical response. That's right. And once I made it clear, do you believe that there's an intelligence, an essence, or something that created us? And he said, oh, no, not in that sense, no. Yeah. Right. So he got to that position from really what I think is a humanitarian view, which I'm kind of coming to in this age of internet degradation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Actually, I hope we'll talk about that, the degradation of our digital lives. Yeah. But it's such an interesting area where ethics is meeting up with... the craziness of what's happening to our lives now that it's all going online.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And as they say, there's two kinds of people. Those who think there's two kinds of people and those who don't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say that in general, as a heuristic in life, what you're saying is good and right. But sometimes there are true binaries and sometimes one side is completely right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So just to give you an example, with my new book, The Anxious Generation, I'm engaged in a debate with people about what caused the gigantic increase in mental illness that began with young people around 2012. It's very sudden and it happens in many, many countries.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And in general, as a social scientist, I favor the view that, well, you know, it's multi-causal and there's all these different factors coming in and, oh, we never want to point to one thing. Sometimes there is one thing. I mean, like leaded gas did some terrible stuff to developing brains. Sometimes there are childhood diseases and sometimes there is one thing that causes a lot.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Yeah, that's right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Yeah, we do. That's right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Yep, that happens. Tell me what you mean by that. In what way are you getting more conservative?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And I have a bunch of thoughts. First, it's long been observed that that is generally the case. I think it was Winston Churchill said, any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart. Any man who's still a socialist at age 30 has no head. Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there is research showing that there's certain life experiences that push people to the right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Having children is the main one, because once you have children, you see more threats in the world, you're more protective, and you have sort of a longer time horizon. Owning a business, when you become a business person, suddenly you see like, wait a second, it's impossible for me to operate my business, all these regulations.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And then also, I don't know about you, but I'm finding I'm just much less passionate than I used to be. And this is also true just about aging. You know, your hormone levels drop, especially from it. Your testosterone level drops.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And I feel like I'm much more stoic. I read a lot of stoic writing. So I can think about things on all sides. Oh, and then there's another factor, which is I have this pet theory that you can't know which side is right perfectly, but you can bet without knowing anything about the topic. I could have a successful betting record on, you give me the disputes, I'll make bets on them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
All I need to know is which side does a better job of suppressing and attacking and threatening its dissidents. If you tell me which side does not allow anyone to question, I can say that side is wrong about most things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
What I talked to you about last time, the coddling the American mind, was about this weird thing that happened on college campuses beginning 2015, but it actually goes back more to 2012, 2013. It's now called the Great Awokenings. And so there was this period, I think it really runs from say 2015 when things got crazy on campus through 2020, that whole crazy year.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
And it's kind of ending now, but there was a period when the left was extraordinarily good at destroying socially anyone who questioned. And that led to terrible policies like the ones you just mentioned. When you're not open to any criticism... You become structurally stupid.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
You have a group of people, they can be brilliant as individuals, but they don't have the normal process of someone saying, hey, let's decriminalize marijuana. Someone says, well, wait, what would happen? If you lose that process, then you become structurally stupid. Obviously, the right is insane as well. I'm not saying that they're smarter.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
But there was a period where the left-dominated cultural institutions put in policies that really backfired. And I believe that's why so many groups moved to the right, moved towards Trump.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Well, what matters is what people see. And so since on both sides, the fringe control, this is what's so upsetting about our politics. The right is not conservative. The left is not liberal. At the center of our discussion here, and especially as we move to the anxious generation, when you get a change in technology, you get a change in so many aspects of life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
When you get television and automobiles, great inventions, but it ends up changing the way we live together because now you're just in your home watching your entertainment center and you get in your car and you go somewhere else. And so it decimated human interaction and neighborhoods. But that was over many, many decades. The move onto smartphones and social media
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
what I call in the book, the great rewiring of childhood. 2010, teens have flip phones. They might have Facebook, but they don't use it very often because they have to use their parents' computer to get on it. There's no privacy, that's right. Whereas by 2015, everyone has a smartphone, social media, Instagram, high-speed internet, limitless texting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
So when you change radically how people are connected, you get massive changes throughout society. That new information environment is kind of what allowed the illiberal elements of the left to dominate and intimidate and harass anyone who dissented. And it ended up doing terrible damage to the left.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
The fact that we have Donald Trump in power saying things like, the laws shouldn't apply to me if I'm trying to save our country. I mean, this is complete madness. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Two ways to look at things. One is the statistical method where you say, what's the average? And the average is always fine. The average college student didn't want to take part in these things. The average college student wanted to do his work, get a job, learn.
The Brett Cooper Show
How This Sparked A MASSIVE Parenting Debate Online | Episode 20
What we did in America was, so, you know, you and I grew up during a crime wave. There was a big crime wave in the 70s and 80s, and it started in the 60s. And so there was actually danger of crime, but we still played outside. Kids went outside. Second, third grade, you're out with your friends, biking around your town. You can buy candy, whatever. You're out on your own. You learn to function.
The Brett Cooper Show
How This Sparked A MASSIVE Parenting Debate Online | Episode 20
You learn autonomy. You learn to be a person. And in the 90s, the crime wave ends, but yet we freak out about child abduction. And we say, well, you can't go outside anymore because you'll be abducted.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
That's why it's always the right that's concerned about the garbage being placed on TV because the right is very concerned about the moral diet coming in. Now, I think in the modern era, I think parents should be more like the conservatives in that respect. And here's why.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
We already talked about the way the neurons are growing, they're wiring up, and you learn to run, climb trees, do all sorts of things. But a big thing you're doing, especially in later childhood, is you're learning the moral order. And humans evolved within a moral order. And I'm a secular Jewish. I was always on the left. Now I'm nothing. I'm not on any team.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
But when I was writing that book, I was really sort of exploring ancient wisdom and discovering... Wow. Every other society, they had this rich moral framework. They have a conception of the gods. There are reasons why you have to do things. And when you raise kids within a moral order, they have a sense of their place in the world and a sense of meaning.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And when you take all that out and you say, you know, all that matters is what feels good or all that matters is rights or all that matters is some measure of material success, basically what you have is what Emile Durkheim called anomie or normlessness. And there's a question on the Monitoring the Future study where since the 70s we've asked high school seniors, my life feels useless.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Do you agree or disagree with that on a five-point scale? And until 2010, it's like around 9% say yes. And then all of a sudden, 2012, it shoots up, it doubles within five or 10 years.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And so I think part of this is if you're immersed in stories that have a moral order to them, which is what I was immersed in when I was a kid, all the stories had some sort of, you know, moral and, you know, even I Dream of Jeannie. I mean, you know, there was a moral framework was put in by the adults who made the show. But what you see on TikTok and Instagram, they're not really stories.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
They're really amoral or immoral. A lot of them are just horrible things. The boys are seeing lots of videos of people getting in accidents or violence. And so a long way to answer your question, kids need moral formation. They need a structure, a shared moral framework. Morality only works like language. You can't have your own language and you can't have your own morality.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
It only works as a shared system, an order. And once kids move on to social media, it's just a million little fragments of nonsense.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I stand by that bold assertion.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And there I see this generational change. You can see sort of the tight moral order of the 1950s. And when you look at old movies, like from the 30s and 40s, there was a really tight moral order. And like, it would be dramatic whether a woman could like go into a man's apartment.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
That was like a, you know, so there was a really intense moral order, including around gender, around all sorts of things. And that, of course, begins to loosen up in the 60s. And there are many good things that happened because of that. But one of the concerns about sort of modern secular society has been you gradually lose this moral framework within which to raise children.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And I'm really aware now of how we each, we're all influenced by our parents and just maybe a little bit by our grandparents. Culture has always sort of come down vertically through generations, but that link is getting weakened. So I think there is a progressive weakening of a sense of a moral order, which affects how you parent. And then we end up with a kind of an amoral relationship.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
focused on grades and, I guess, be nice and a few other things, but it's a very thin moral gruel, I'd say.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
No, I think that's exactly right. I'll just bring a couple points to bear. One is there's an incredible book called called The Age of Addiction by David Courtright. And he chronicles how people have always wanted sugar and they foraged for fruit, but then you learn to refine sugar and now you get sugar-based products and then you get candy.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And then, so once we get a market-based economy in the Industrial Revolution, We find more and more ways to make these products that our brains evolved to crave, but now they're limitless. You can have limitless quantities effortlessly. And the same is true for opiates. You get opium to heroin to fentanyl.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
A free market society, the best definition of it I heard was from a philosopher who said, a good free market society is one in which you can only get rich by making other people better off. And for the most part in our economy, that is still true. But now let's look at the products we're talking about.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
If you're a sports betting company, if you're a crypto company, if you're a video game company, if you're a social media company, are you making your money by making people better off? Or are you playing on addiction, manipulating social forces? Are you spreading enormous negative externalities around society? And I would argue that's what's happening.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And partly it is due, I think, to the deregulatory impulse to the fact that we have lost the ability to regulate things in a smart way. And so one principle I really want to make clear in all of this is we have to distinguish between children and adults. So we are a generally libertarian country compared to Europe where they're happy to ban anything.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
When we're talking about adults, I think we're generally right. Generally, we should let adults do what they want unless there's compelling evidence for some reason. But when we're talking about kids, it's entirely different. And when you have entire trillion-dollar industries... Where do they make their money from? I didn't pay them a penny. You didn't pay them a penny.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Our kids didn't pay them a penny. That entire value is created by breaking up the day into tiny little bits and sucking out the attention and selling it to advertisers and selling the data.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Okay. All right. Hold on a second here. So in general, I agree with you that the technology makes everything easy. And for adults, that actually is often good. Not But for kids, it's disastrous because kids need to learn to do hard things. And the technology makes it easy for them to not do hard things.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
But if I could just add on, you started this off by saying, oh, you don't think that, you know, we're not going to get an actual age verification system. The one real obstacle that I have faced, and once I put the book out, you know, parents love it. They're embracing it. Teachers are embracing it. The main objection I get is resignation. It's just people saying, what are you going to do?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
You know, technology is here to stay. You know, the kids, they're going to have to use it when they're adults. Might as well learn when they're kids. You know, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. But actually we can, and we're doing it. So I just really want to make the point that we don't have easy age verification now, but But if we incentivize it, we'll have it within a year.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So my colleague at NYU, Scott Galloway, gives the example of how the social media companies, this industry, they put a lot of research and money into advertising.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And so they figured out a way that when you click a link anywhere on the internet, when you click a link and then the page loads, in between that time, there has been an auction among thousands of companies for the right to show you, you, this particular ad. This is a miracle of technical innovation. And they did that because there was money in it.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And now the question is, do you think maybe they could figure out if somebody is under 16 or over 16? Also, that auction knows how old it thinks you are. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. They know everything about us. And they're saying, oh, what are you going to do? The kids are going to lie. Like, what are we supposed to do? So we're going to get age verification. Australia is pushing it.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
It's going to work. It doesn't have to be perfect at first, but within a few years, it will be very good.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So the way to understand why it's changing so quickly is to go back before COVID. So, Jean Twenge comes out with her famous article in 2017, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? Now, at the time, the empirical evidence was not clear at all, and she was savagely attacked by other researchers and, oh, this is just a correlation. No, you have no evidence. It's not causal. So that's 2017.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
With 2019, we're beginning to see, actually, wait, there is some evidence and everybody's now seeing something's creepy about this. And we're seeing our kids drift away. And then COVID comes in. What happens? What kids desperately need in 2019, Gina and I were saying, was more time outside playing, less time on screens. What happens? We freak out. We put in way too strict restrictions.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
We say, no, you can't. In New York, they closed the playgrounds. They closed down the ball fields. So no playing outside. You might catch COVID. So things get far, far worse over the next couple of years, but the kids have to be on screens. So it's only as COVID began to clear away, people are sort of coming back to their senses about this. And that's why everybody's sort of ready to act.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And that's why when my book came out, a year ago, came out in late March of 2024, I didn't have to persuade anyone. Almost everybody saw, wait, something is going terribly wrong here. And so what's happening around the world is that legislators are mostly parents and they've seen it and they're uncomfortable with it. It doesn't matter if they're Democrat or Republican.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Heads of state, mostly our parents. The way the Australia bill got started was in South Australia, one of the states, the wife of the premier was reading The Anxious Generation in bed and she turns to him and says, Peter, you've got to read this book and then you've got to effing do something about it. It's the way that he described it, at least.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And I think mothers have felt it more keenly than fathers. Mothers just... And they're more emotionally connected in ways where they could feel the kids being pulled away. So that's why it's happening everywhere because it's obvious. It's common sense. Most people see it. What is happening everywhere? So I would say it's a parent's revolution saying we're sick and tired.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
We're not going to take this anymore. All over the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. We're all fed up. We want to do something about it. Okay, what do we actually do? Yeah. I wrote the book as an American, assuming that we'll never get help from Congress. Now, I hope I'm wrong. There are some bills that could get through.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
But I was just sort of assuming we have a dysfunctional Congress. Let's try to do this the way Tocqueville said that we do it. Like, let's get together. Let's figure out how to do this. And so that means action among families and at schools and at states. I am finding states are incredibly responsive. States in the United States are either mostly red or blue, but this is a bipartisan issue.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So the number one step that they're all taking is so easy and so obvious, and it doesn't cost anything, which is phone-free schools. Check your phone in the morning. What are some of the states that are doing it? Well, Florida was one of the first, but they did it just during instructional time, which is worthless because then everyone rushes for their phone.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
They're on their phone in between classes. They don't talk to each other. So I'm not sure where they are now. Arkansas, Utah, but it's-
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
They also have a really excellent governor. Governor Cox has been just superb. He wants to make Utah the most family friendly state and many states want to. And, you know, if we feel that we can't let our kids out and our kids are rotting away on screens and their screens all day in the school, that's not a family friendly place. So, yeah, Utah has been great on this. Oh, here we are in New York.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Governor Hochul has been great on this. We're going to get phone free bell to bell legislation here in New York. New Jersey is moving that way. Connecticut. So we're seeing it all over the country. That's the phone-free schools. So in the book, I say there are four norms. With four norms, we can roll back the phone-based childhood. The first is no smartphone before high school.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Do not give your kid a touchscreen. This includes an iPad. Don't give them their own. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
What is childhood for? Childhood is evolution's answer to how do you have a big-brained cultural creature? You have to play a lot. You have to practice all sorts of things, all sorts of maneuvers, all sorts of social skills in order to tell your brain how to wire up to have the adult form.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So if you focus on brain development, especially for a big-brained cultural species like ours, there's a plastic period, a period where stuff comes in and it shapes who you are. And then once you've got that, now you're ready to convert to the adult form, be reproductive, have a baby. But if you don't have play in the childhood, you're not going to reach the adult form properly.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
. . . . ., the, P P P P P P P P P,實 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a a
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
That's right, because we're used to thinking of bodily growth as just time equals bigger. But the brain is this amazing thing that has all these neurons that have the potential to connect in all kinds of ways. And as neuroscientists say, neurons that fire together wire together. So if you repeatedly climb trees or do archery, systems will form in your brain that make you really good at that.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Right, right. In theory, yes, there is a danger of that. And history would suggest examples of it. Every generation is wary of the technology that comes in that the kids are using. But... If it turned out that our kids were flourishing, then I would just be an old man shaking his head at the clouds. But our kids are the least flourishing generation we know of ever, certainly in modern times.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
If it was the case that our kids love this stuff and they said, no, we love TikTok. No, let us keep TikTok. Then maybe I just don't understand it. But we did a survey with the Harris poll. 50% of Gen Z said they would prefer that TikTok was never invented, never invented. They feel trapped by it. So if you've got the kids themselves— Although they don't want to give it up, which is the paradox.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
No, but they don't want to be the only one. If we could all give it up, then actually most of them would do it.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
No, but guess what? There wasn't much objection. There were creators. There were people making money from it. But I was surprised. There was not a youth rebellion saying, no, let us keep— I think you're not on TikTok. And you're not a legislator getting letters about this. Well, right, because TikTok motivated a lot of them to write to their legislators.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
But the point is that when you survey them, they feel trapped and they're looking for an escape. They're just terrified of being the only one. So in theory, I could be wrong and right. we will adapt this. But I think the way you described it, well, no, they're just, you know, they've adapted to it. I would say they've been deformed by it.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So there's a sense in which they fit, but they fit not as agents. They fit not as full human beings who are making a future of themselves. They fit as human fodder that has been sucked into the machine and molded to what the machine wants out of them, which is their attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Whereas if you repeatedly swipe, tap, swipe, tap, and just respond to emotional stimuli, your brain's going to wire to do that. So almost everybody over 35 or so, I guess you're an older millennial. How did you grow up? I'm among the eldest of millennials. The elders, the millennial elders. Tell me when at what age you could go out on your bicycle with your friends and go around the neighborhood.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So what you're describing is a path that opened up to prestige. So teenagers are desperate for prestige. And what the social media companies did—and we know this from things that insiders have said— is they hacked that. They said, you know, normally throughout history to become prestigious, you had to become a good archer or a good leader or a good basket weaver.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
You had to do something in the world and then people would respect you and you would gain in social status. That's the way it always used to be. And what social media is able to do is say, you don't have to do anything. Just do whatever it takes to get people to follow you and bingo, you've got prestige. And where does it end? I'll tell you where it ends.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
In one of the most disgusting apps I've ever seen. Well, there are lots of competition, but there's a thing called Famify. And the idea is lots of young people are lonely. They're not able to get followers. They're putting stuff out there. Nobody's watching. Well, that's really crushing. Imagine your nine-year-old not getting any followers. But if you give her Famify...
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And Famify will generate as many followers as you want. You want millions? You got it. Millions of followers. And you can see them. You know, they're praising you. They're giving you hearts. So Famify is a way to take what you just said that, oh, well, yes, well, they actually they are searching for a way to be successful without any attention. No need. Just give them Famify.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And this is AI followers? AI followers, that's right. Oh, this is the most Black Mirror shit I've ever heard. Exactly, exactly. And this is why I am so passionate about how we have to move quickly this year, 2025. This is really our last year before AI really has a big impact on life.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
You know, now that we're moving not just from you can know everything to now we have agents, you can do everything. I mean, the internet in a sense gave us omniscience, but now AI with agents is going to give us omnipotence. And that would be horrible for children.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
More responsive than any man probably.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
The way we adapt is by preventing kids from having these friendships. So here I'll draw on a really insightful analysis from a Christian writer, Andy Crouch. I did a session with him at NYU. We had a conversation, mostly on Chapter 8 of The Anxious Generation, on the spirituality chapter. And he said something so powerful. I always bring it up because it's so helpful. He said, what is magic?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Magic is instant, effortless effect on the world. Snap your fingers, something appears. It's always been the human dream. And technology is essentially magic. Technology allows us to do things. You want a car to come pick you up? Press a button. Hey, here's this car. So the technology is magic. And he says, now let's look at how children are formed. How do you get an adult?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And again, he's coming from a Christian perspective, so they care a lot about the moral formation, the religious formation of their children. And he says, the three areas of formation for children are home, school, and church, or any religious organization. So he says, those are the three areas. And he says, all three of those areas are now colonized by tech.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
All three of them, and all three of them, kids have magic available to them all the time. Even in church, I'm hearing from pastors, they say, pull out your Bible, they pull out their phone, they look at the passage, but then they go on and do something else. So I think we have to stop that. This is not even about the content. We have to stop saying, oh, we just need better content moderation.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
No, we don't. We need to realize kids have to go through a childhood in the real world with other kids within a moral universe where they experience the consequences of their own action. And they have to learn how to deal with real people who are frustrating.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And if we give them AI companions that they can order around, that will always flatter them, we are creating people that no one will want to employ or marry. So we've got to stop.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Very powerful, that's right.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
That's right. So this is what human childhood has always been. There are periods of the Industrial Revolution where maybe kids didn't have a childhood, but Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist who co-founded Let Grow With Me, he has some writing on hunter-gatherers. And hunter-gatherers raise their kids in that way.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And it really frightens me as a parent. Yeah, as it should. So a couple of concepts here. One is the concept of entanglement. So Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology. points out that social media has gotten so entangled in our world that it's really hard to roll it back. Many schools communicate on Instagram. They require the kids to have smartphones.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So it's really hard to rip it out once it's already taken root. Both of my kids' schools communicate with me by app.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
It has to be on my phone. It has to be your phone. That's right. So social media is so entangled. It's very hard to rip it out. It's going to be very hard to get it out of our kids' childhoods, but that's what we're working on. AI is not yet entangled. AI is just coming in. And in two or three years, it will be entangled. And as you say, there are many good applications.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Khan Academy uses AI very well. And if we could have a device that just did Khan Academy and nothing else, that I can see would have a positive impact on education. Maybe we don't have to throw out all the iPads from the schools. Maybe we could use them if we can reduce them to one function.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Oh, yes. Yeah, that's right. It does. I mean, you know, kids are losing the ability to draw, to write. These technologies, so far, Silicon Valley has a horrible track record at living up to its promises, especially for kids. So social media is going to connect everyone. No, it actually disconnected everyone.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So when the purveyors of AI say, oh, there's all these amazing uses, and AI, there clearly will, and there already are. I'm finding that Claude and ChatGPT are just really helpful adjuncts to research. So I love AI as an adult. But we have to understand children are not adults. And given the track record so far, we have to assume that these AI companions will be very bad for our children.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
That's what the Silicon Valley people themselves say in the sense that they have already voted to keep their kids away from social media and technology. They send their kids to the Waldorf school. So we have to approach all of this with a really skeptical eye, especially for our children. Start by assuming it's harming your kids, and then you can bring in some uses where it's not.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
There's no thought that the mother has to be supervising the four, five, six, seven, nine-year-olds. They're all off playing with the other kids. And there are 9- and 10-year-olds there. And so they learn to look out for each other. The older kids learn to care for the younger kids.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So the way I think about it is that I often hear the argument, well, you know, this is the world the kids are in and for them to be successful, they need to master the technology and it's going to be in the workplace. And my answer is very simple. I'm teaching these kids. If you want to send me someone who's going to do well at NYU Stern, don't send me someone who has mastered Instagram.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Send me someone who is homeschooled, never had any of this garbage. They're able to pay attention. They're able to read a book. They're, you know, in a sense, our brains are LLMs in a sense. And so don't send me kids whose LLMs were filled in by TikTok. Send me a kid whose LLM was figured in within a stable moral community.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And that kid is going to be adapted for the future because he didn't have the current technology when he was growing up. The current technology is a giant obstacle to human development. And so if you want to prepare your kid for the future, think very carefully about the technology you immerse him in.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And the younger kids, remember, they're trying to wire up their brain to like what is a functional member of this society. And the best role models for them are not kids their age. It's kids a few years older. And so in America, in the West, we've got these factory kind of schools where we put all the 8-year-olds are together and then all the 9-year-olds are together.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
mental health, but probably a lot of other things. I would never say that as a blanket rule. We don't have to raise our kids the way hunter-gatherers did. There are many aspects of modern life that are improvements. So I would not endorse a blind sort of, you know, well, this is the way it used to be, so this is what we should do. But when we begin to see evidence...
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And it's just kind of obvious. What do you think? Do you think kids should be raised around other kids or around screens? Like, it's just kind of obvious. So, yes, I've always studied morality, but I've always done it from multiple perspectives. I've always been a developmental psychologist, a social psychologist, an evolutionary psychologist. I read anthropology.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So you put all these together and you get this view of this amazing world. amazing species that develop culture. No other species has culture. I mean, chimps have a tiny bit. And the miracle of our ability to develop these skills and the ability to communicate, and then we come in and we radically change childhood and we think, maybe it'll be okay. Well, it's not okay.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
It's pretty clear it's not okay. We didn't radically change childhood.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And we feel we can't stop them and they're able to stop bills in Congress and they're able to, they have giant PR budgets and they're able to manipulate the narrative behind the scenes. So yeah, it's a hell of a struggle. But what we're seeing is a parent's revolution around the world. And I think if most parents rise up and say no more, I think we're going to win.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
It's interesting that you've had to sit down and ask, what is a syllabus on flourishing? Yeah. What is a syllabus on flourishing? Oh, I can tell you in just a few words. The course is organized around making you stronger emotionally. So stronger, smarter, and more sociable. Because if we can do that together, if we can, you have to cultivate new habits, make changes to your routine.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
If you can become stronger, smarter, and more sociable, then you are likely to be more successful in love, broadly construed relationships, in love and in work. And that's the modern formula for happiness, success in love and work, as Freud originally said. And if you are more successful in love and in work, then you will be happier. That's almost guaranteed. So that's what the course is about.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
What that you assign connects the most? Oh, well, I know you're going to ask me about the three books. You know what? Let's just do the three books right now because this is the three books, okay?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
The three books for the undergrads especially, and this is what I would recommend to any member of Gen Z, any young person in their 20s, anybody who feels their attention has been fried and they want to get it back. Here are the three books. The first is The Stoic Challenge by William Irvine. It really makes Stoicism just so accessible.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
When you get setbacks, the students learn to say, I just missed the subway. Now I'm going to be late. Like Stoic challenge. You just say Stoic challenge. It's as though they're Stoic gods and they're testing me to make me strong. And yeah, I missed my train, but am I going to also hurt myself by stewing for 20 minutes? Nope. I'm going to be calm about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And so you develop that habit of more stoic reactions and they get stronger. They're not so anxious. They don't get angry or irritated at other people so much. So stoic challenge. The second book is by Cal Newport. It's called Deep Work. And this is why I'm so passionate about attention. Without your attention, you can't do anything.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And as Newport says, a deep life, where you do a lot of deep work, a deep life is a good life. It is a rich life. And so Cal Newport, we work on that to regain their attention. We work on turning off almost all notifications, on moving social media off your phone, onto your computer, and then for some, deleting it from the computer. So that's a wonderful book.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
But the healthiest is what you just said. And so my point is everyone before the millennials had this childhood. Millennials are the transitional generation. So you are on the elder side. You got it. Even though the rates are microscopic in this country and even though crime was plummeting in this country in the 90s, that's the decade. And you can see it in the charts.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And then the third book is Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It is timeless. He is writing in the 30s, and he is such a great social psychologist. So I urge everybody, listeners, if you have not read Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, I urge you to read it. Ideally in the 1936 edition. It's so charming. Don't get the modern one for the digital age.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
It's completely rewritten. The writing's not nearly as good. But those are the three books. So the first one makes you stronger. If you do the Stoic Challenge over a couple months, you get stronger. You're not as reactive to negative things. If you read Deep Work and take it seriously, you're going to spend a lot less time on social media.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
You're going to take control of your time so that you have time for deep work. And if you read Dale Carnegie, you're going to be just much more effective in conversation and maintaining relationships. That's it. Those three books. Jonathan Knight, thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
That's the decade when we really pulled our kids in. We thought they'll get abducted. We can't let them go in a different aisle of a supermarket or a man with a white vest. I mean, all this crazy stuff comes in in the 90s.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I don't think anybody can dispute that. What he says is controversial.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
That's right. There's this weird graph that I have in the book. which shows the number of hours that women spend in parenting, you know, what you would consider time with your kid doing something. And the astonishing thing is that in the 50s, 60s, 70s, women were not spending five hours a day parenting because the kids were raised the way that you just said.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
It's not the parent's job to socialize the child all along. It's the parent's job to provide the right environment, to provide certain kinds of moral frameworks. But the real work of brain development doesn't happen when you're with your parents. Your parents are home base. They're your attachment figure. When you feel securely attached, then you go off and explore. And that's the mammal way.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
That's what other mammals do. You go off progressively further from your home base, and that's where the learning happens. It's playing kickball, trying to decide, what do we do today? Oh, he broke the rules.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
It's not true. It's definitely not true. You want to give your kids a quality childhood. You want to be a quality parent. But that doesn't mean that you have to spend a lot of quality time with your kid. You need a warm, trusting, loving relationship. You need to provide structure and order and discipline.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
But this is what changed in the 90s, and it's in part because we stopped trusting our neighbors. If you think of all the Robert Putnam stuff about bowling alone and the loss of social capital, we used to at least trust that if our kids were out playing without us, other adults would look out for them. If something really went wrong, they could knock on a door, like someone would help.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
But we begin losing that trust. And this is really bad for the kids because the kids don't grow as much if their attachment figure is there. And it's really bad for the adults, especially the women. The mothers pick up a lot of this, even though they're working outside the home. So yes, modern parenting is not good for the kids and certainly not good for the adults.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So it's the conversion over to this smartphone-based, tablet-based childhood. That's when all the indicators of mental illness start rising around 2012, 2013. Yeah. Now, I focused on the 2010 to 2015 period, but I think your question points out something I hadn't really thought much about, which is cable TV.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I was born in 1963, so I grew up in the late 60s, early 70s on, you know, I Dream of Jeannie and, you know, Gilligan's Island. You know, I showed those shows to my kids and I said, this is so stupid. Like, they were really simple plots, but that's all we had. Whereas you had cable, which was more engaging. And console video games.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Yeah, that's right. That's a good point. I've been more focused on the arrival of the internet, but Nintendo didn't require the internet, right? No. Right. Okay. You are not a gamer, John. No. Well, I was because when I was a kid, the game was Pong. This is 8-bit Mario, man. This is the early stuff. Okay, so the early stuff was great fun, but it was not multiplayer.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Your friend had to sit next to you to play, right? Right. So I hope this will be a theme that I'm thinking a lot more about this. Don't just think about screen time. Think about what is it that makes it good or bad? Because I remember just as video games was coming in, And you'd hook it up to your TV. So like my friends and I would get together and say, what do you want to do? Play video games?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Like, okay, we'll do that for a little bit. And then we'd go off and do something else. Nothing harmful about that. What happens in the 2000s, once you begin to get the multiplayer games, because this requires not just the internet, it requires high-speed internet. in order to have these amazing graphics shared in multiple screens at the same time without a lag.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So that's only, you know, like 2008, 2009, it begins to get popular. But then it's in this great rewiring period, 2010 to 2015, this is when everyone's trading in their flip phones for smartphones. This is when high-speed internet is increasing greatly. So by 2015, boys are all on these multiplayer games. My son played Fortnite.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I didn't let him on until he was 13, but they laughed their heads off. The boys at least had that synchronous laughter. They're not in the same room, so it's not as good, but they at least had that. Whereas the girls are each alone on their own Instagram account. They might laugh at something, but they're not having shared laughter.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
What you're describing is the loss of any moral framework. And if you try to raise kids without a moral framework, it's not going to go well.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And this, yeah, and while I want to stay away from politics in our talk in general, what you're bringing up is one of the divisions that I talked about in The Righteous Mind between left and right. And that is that, you know, in general, the right, you know, conservatism, conserve what we have, right? There's a wisdom to our ancestors. This is Edmund Burke.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And so the right tends to see they have what's called a constrained view of human nature. If kids don't have structure and order and punishment for bad deeds, they'll come out badly. Whereas the left tends to habitually question existing arrangements and pull things down if they seem unjust. And the left is much more afraid to make value judgments and to impose a moral order on kids.