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.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
If I let my kid go get milk in two aisles over in the supermarket, someone will say, hey, little kid, do you want some candy? Come into my car. Like that never, okay. It did happen once in Florida. That's actually the thing. It happened once in Florida in 1980. But it's extremely, extremely unlikely. Yeah. So we freaked out over child abduction in the 90s. We didn't stop letting our kids out.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So act one of the tragedy is we lose the play-based childhood, which is a biological necessity. But their mental health doesn't drop right then. The millennials, as I said, the millennials' mental health was a little better, actually, than that of Gen X. There's not really a difference. So in the 90s, there's no big change in their mental health.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And then in act two of the tragedy is the great rewiring, which I just told you about. We take away the flip phones. A flip phone is a tool, you can call your friends, you can text them. You're not communicating with a hundred strange men around the world on a flip phone. So take away the flip phone, give them a smartphone. So this is what I call the arrival of the phone-based childhood.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And giving a kid a phone-based childhood, it's like raising a kid on Mars. It's an alien environment. It's not good for human development. And that's what we did. So it's a two-act tragedy. And that's why I believe rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide surged in the early 2010s.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So it depends on the exact survey and which subpopulation you're looking at. But as a general rule, the numbers are pretty much always between 50 and 150%. So I'll just give you a couple. If we look at the overall suicide rate for teenagers, that is up 50% between 2010 and... I forget if it's 2019 or 2022, 23, whatever, it's up 50%.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
But whenever we zoom in on preteen girls, we get much higher percentage changes. Now they have a very low suicide rate, but it's up 150%, 150% increase in younger teen girls' suicide. It used to be very rare. Now it's more common. Now boys' rates are even higher. They go up a lot too. But the percentage increases are always gigantic for the 10 to 14-year-old girls, often well over 100%.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
But we're talking about increases of anxiety, depression, 50 to 150% is the general rule.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
You were called Latchkey Kids.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
That's right. Those are all harmful things. That's right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
That's right. But there are a lot of social changes happening at the same time. And so, you know, when I was a kid, mothers generally didn't work. Most families had three or four kids. People were out playing and parents weren't spending a lot of time parenting. It was this, you know, the mom's taking care of the house, kids are out playing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And what happens in the 80s as women begin entering the workforce, as everyone's getting more educated, and people with college degrees tend to have fewer children, as college admissions are getting more competitive. So we get this transformation where families now are smaller and more focused on getting the kid into college, which is very much like what they do in East Asia, like in Korea.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
You know, there's no childhood in Korea. All of childhood is preparation to take an exam to try to get into one of three schools. It's really tragic what they've done in Korea. But we're on the road to doing that ourselves here in America. So you get a bunch of social change, but you get more high impact.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
The fear that comes in in the 1990s of abduction now makes us think that a good mother is one who protects her child. And a lot of the burden of this really falls on mothers. The criticism, I mean, the mommy wars, you know, anything a mother does, someone's gonna criticize it as being the wrong thing. Fathers, we're kind of let off the hook there.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
You know, if I let my son take risks, people are gonna say, oh, he's teaching him to be tough. You know, whereas mothers, it's much riskier because someone's gonna judge you. And so once you get all this criticism, a lot of women, I think, are sort of pressured into overprotecting, hovering, always being there. So I think that's part of it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
The key psychological idea I want to give your listeners is called anti-fragility. If you think your child is fragile, you're going to overprotect them, wrap them in bubble wrap, never let them get hurt, never let them take risks. But if you do that, then you keep your kid fragile. And those are the kids who showed up beginning in 2014 on campus, Gen Z. But if you understand that we're mammals...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
who are programmed to take risks, watch kids play naturally. Once a kid learns how to ride on a skateboard, they don't just ride back and forth. They try harder things. They try a bigger hill. They go downstairs. They go downstairs railings. Why are they doing that? Because their brain is pushing them to test the limits. That's how they learn. That's how you get strong.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
That's how you get resourceful. That's how you learn to manage risk on your own. You have to fall down. You can't have a child without falling down and scraping yourself and banging your head sometimes. Obviously, we want to watch out for concussions. I'm all in favor of bike helmets. But... If we're protecting our kids in ways that block them from having experience, then we are harming them.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
We're giving them a vitamin P deficiency, you might say. Our kids are antifragile. They have to take risks. They have to get hurt. They have to be excluded sometimes. You don't want them being bullied over days, but they have to experience conflict and criticism and exclusion at school. They have to experience that. And it hurts us. We don't want that to happen. So we jump in.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
We're always there for them. And we're blocking their development.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
True, but I think it's about to turn around. You tell me. So one of the key ideas in my book is collective action. Mm-hmm. The reason we fell into this so quickly is that once a few kids got a smartphone and social media, that put pressure on all the other kids to get it because they don't want to be left out.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And that puts pressure on the parents to give in because they don't want the kid to be left out. So this is called a collective action problem where we're not making up our, we're not, each parent isn't deciding, hmm, what are the pros and cons of getting a phone? We're not making our private decisions. It's collectively made for us. There's a lot of pressure. similarly about how to parent.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
I co-founded an organization called Let Grow, letgrow.org, with a wonderful woman named Lenore Skenazy. And the reason she got into this area is that she let her nine-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone in the year 2008, I think it was. And he knew the subway system. He went from a store back to his house. Everything was great. He loved it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
But she went on the news and talked about this. And the hate mail, people saying, you're the worst mother in America. How could you ever do that? Your kid could be abducted. And so this overprotection, which is harming kids, that's what led Lenore to write a book called Free Range Kids, and then we founded Let Grow.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
But to return to my point about collective action, many parents, mothers especially, are afraid to let their kid out because they'll be judged by others. And so the way out of this is through collective action. We can get out of this if we act together. And so in the book, I propose four norms that if we do them, And it doesn't have to be everybody.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
It can just be you and five friends first, and then it can be you and your kid's school. If we do this, we escape from the phone-free childhood. Here it is. One, no smartphone before high school or age 14. Do not give your kid a touchscreen. Laptop is not nearly as bad, but there are issues still. An iPad, it turns out, is just as bad.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
It's the touchscreen technology that's super, super addictive because you get stimulus response reinforcement, stimulus response reinforcement. Television didn't do that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So no smartphone before 14. Give them a flip phone. You want to keep in touch with them? You want them to call you? Give them a flip phone. It's a phone. It's not a way for strange men to contact them. Second rule, no social media before 16. This is really important. Social media is wildly inappropriate. Even if they could remove 90% of the porn and the grooming and the violence,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Even if they can move 100%, these things are engineered to addict your child, take all of their available time, damage their ability to attend, take every moment. Kids, you know, now that the iPhone is waterproof, kids take it into the shower. They are never without stuff coming in. So just no social media till 16.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
at least but that should be the norm the third is phone free schools if you are able to call or text your child during the school day i guarantee you your child feels like she has to check her phone often because lots of kids are texting each other direct messaging each other sending snaps talking about the latest video on tick tock this is the last thing you want your child to be doing in school you want your child to be listening to the teacher or sending notes back and forth
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
like literally physically talking to their friends in school, not hundreds of people around the world. So phone-free schools is a must. If you can reach your child during the school day, your child's education is not nearly as good as it could be if she had a phone-free school. Oh, and California's going phone-free. This is really great news.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Governor Newsom signed, I think he signed the bill already, but California schools will be phone-free in a year or two. That's amazing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And porn and social media. That's right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Yes, it does. Yes, it does. So two things. First, getting rid of the phones is the easy part because all the teachers hate it. All the principals hate it. So you got to get rid of the phones. Second, it's the phones that destroy lunchtime and time in between classes. They're not going to be on their laptop in the hallway, but they are on their phones.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And so when schools go phone free, the universal thing you always hear, you always see it in the news reports, is you hear a teacher or principal saying, we hear laughter in the hallways again. We haven't heard much of that in 10 years, 15 years. So you gotta get rid of the phones. That's the first step, and that's easy. Now, what you raise is the next battleground.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
I didn't say much about that at all in the book, because I didn't know when I was writing the book. But since I submitted the manuscript a year and a half ago, I've been learning a lot more. And the evidence is really damning about the one-to-one technology. We all thought in the 90s and early 2000s, oh, rich kids have computers. We need to get computers for everyone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
It's a pleasure to be here.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Get a computer on every desk, we thought. And the ed tech companies and Google and Apple were thrilled. They really pushed it, especially Google after 2012 or so. So the Chromebook is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. What effect does this have? So let me just level set by saying I teach college students at New York University and I teach MBA students who are 27 to 30 years old.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
They can't handle a computer on their desk. They cannot do it. I used to always let them take notes on a computer because I like to take notes on a computer. But the TA would sit in the back of the room, even though I made them pledge, they had literally stand up and swear. that you will only use your computer for class-related purposes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
They all stand up, they swear it, but the TA says half of them are online shopping, they're texting, they're checking their LinkedIn for the grad students. They can't do it. None of us can do it. You know, we're always multitasking when we're on a Zoom call. So college students' education is damaged if they have access to a computer during class, okay? Now let's look at nine-year-olds.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
What do we think nine-year-olds are going to do? Or 12-year-olds who are deep into gossip and talking about each other? There's no way in hell they're going to just do the thing they're supposed to do. So it's looking more and more like ed tech, especially, I can't say all of it. I'm sure there are some things that are good. Khan Academy is good.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
I don't know, you know, the teacher having a computer to present things on a screen. That's probably good, but I haven't done research on that yet. The thing we need to focus on next is get every device off of the desktop. Kids must not have a multifunction device on their desktop. If they do, they might as well just stay home.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
There's really no point in coming into school and having a teacher talk in front of the room if the kids are on multifunction devices.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
But we're turning that around. We're turning that around. And the reason why I'm confident is that it's now clear that student test scores have been declining since 2012. So test scores, we have national, there's the national thing, the national assessment of education progress. tracking students since the 1970s, early 70s.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And what you can see is that in reading and math, the two areas, scores have been rising very gradually, slowly, but they've been rising from the 70s through 2012. And then they start dropping. Now they drop faster after COVID. And so people say, oh my God, COVID caused this. But when you look at the graphs, what you see is that the peak was 2012, and it's downhill since 2012.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And it's faster downhill from 2020 to 2022, 23. And people say, oh, well, you know, it'll rebound because that was just COVID. We just got the 2024 numbers in about a month ago. No rebound. And guess what?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
what happens is the the kids at the top the kids who are the best students their scores are kind of level over the last 10 years they haven't dropped much they dropped a little bit not a lot all the drop comes from the students at the bottom and so if you care about equity if you care about the kids who are the worst performers who are disproportionately going to be low ses single-parent families the mom's overwhelmed she can't hire babysitters the kid is raised on a screen
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
These are the kids who are being devastated. Their education is being devastated. So even though we once thought that it was an equity move to get a computer on every kid's desk, it turns out it's the reverse. Because it's the rich kids who have two married college educated parents, they're the ones who have some limits and controls at home.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Well, it was actually a kind of a sidetrack originally. I'd written, my previous book was The Coddling of the American Mind. And it was about how overprotection is really weakening our kids. And we saw the students who arrived on campus around 2014, 2015. I teach at NYU, but all of us have seen this. The students arriving in 2014 or so, which is very different.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Whereas the kids who don't have that, they're on their screens much more. For them, it's more like 12 hours a day on their screen as opposed to eight or nine for the wealthier kids. 12 hours a day, that's your whole life. And so we've got to at least give them six or seven hours a day without addiction. And that's why we have to have phone-free schools.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
No, because they're multitasking. And so what happens when you see, and this is what, look, I teach in a business school. I talk to a lot of people in the corporate world. they're really unhappy with their Gen Z employees.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
They can't pay attention, they sit at their desk, they have their phone in front of their computer, they're going back and forth, social media, this, that, some work, they're multitasking. And this I think is actually the biggest damage that is done. In my book, I focused on mental illness, as the outcome. I focus on what it is doing to their mental health.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
But now I believe that the biggest damage is actually not even the mental health. It's actually the complete shattering of attention. So I would urge your listeners, talk to high school kids now and ask them if they or their friends have difficulty watching a movie. A lot of kids now say they can't sit through a 90 or 100 minute movie.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Now they can do it if they have their phone because they can be going back and forth. But paying attention to a story for 100 minutes? Who can do that? I spoke with the former CEO of Netflix. He said, Netflix is going shorter and shorter content, fewer movies, because younger people can't watch a movie. They can't pay attention. Same thing for books.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
As one of my students put it, we had a discussion about this. I teach a course called Flourishing. We talk about these issues. As one of my students put it, I take out a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
They were much more fragile, much higher rates of anxiety, much more upset by things they saw or heard or read. And so I wrote a whole book on that with my friend Greg Lukianoff, and we focused on overprotection. And that's a part of the story, very important part of the story. But at the time, we were writing this in 2017 mostly, the evidence wasn't clear that social media was harming kids.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Because if you've raised your kids since they were two with an iPad or a multifunction device, you've conditioned their brain that at this first hint of boredom, this isn't so interesting. It's not the most interesting thing. There might be something more interesting over here or there or there or there. Let me check it out. And so here, let me give you some, okay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
I'm sure some of your listeners are thinking, oh my God, you mean I have to take it all away? How am I gonna raise my kid with no screens? What are they gonna do? So let me give you, I think this comparison might help a lot of your listeners. I'm not saying get rid of all screens. Let me just explain. Here's good screen use.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Using a television to play a long story for a kid who is watching it with another kid or adult. That's good because humans are storytelling animals. We love stories. We've always raised our kids on stories for tens of thousands of years. And so if a kid is watching a story on a TV screen, And it's going to play for 30 minutes or 90 minutes, and he can't manipulate it. He can't change the channel.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
He's just going to watch it. And if there's someone he can talk about it with or laugh with, that's actually fine. That's a pretty good thing. I wouldn't say, you know, watch a movie every single day, but don't worry about your kid watching, you know, a couple movies a week. That's totally fine because that's story time. Now, here's what's really, really bad. It's fragmenting time.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So the really, the worst use of screens is, here, kid, here's my iPhone or an iPad. Shut up. We're in a restaurant or I'm trying to make dinner. Shut up. Here you go. That's the worst thing you can do because that's not story time. That's clicking, getting rewards, clicking, getting rewards, moving over. That is what damages a child's developing ability to pay attention.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So I would urge no fragmenting time until at least 14. Once you give them a phone, they're going to do fragmenting time all day long. But at least let their brain get through early puberty before you break attention into tiny little pieces.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
That's right. So I misspoke before when I said actually the biggest damage is to their attention. I think the mental illness, the fragmenting of attention, and the loss of social skills, each one is a gigantic catastrophe, not just for the country, but for the world, because it's happening all over the developed world. Wherever we raise kids on touchscreens, this is happening.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So what we know is that the millennial generation, which is not mentally ill, they were, their dating life, it all runs through the apps. You'd think they're having a lot of sex, it's so easy, but they're actually having less sex than any previous generation. So there was already a sex recession for the millennials. Now I haven't been able to get data- Why is that?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
There were people writing about it. There were a few experiments. It wasn't really clear. So we just had a couple paragraphs in the book saying, well, maybe social media is part of this. But then the mental health stats kept getting worse and worse and worse. And this is all before COVID. COVID made it worse still, but all of this was baked in before, by 2019.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
You know, the apps don't, for one thing, okay, for one thing, most sex happens in long running couples. It's not hookups. When you're married, you have a lot more sex than single people because you have a regular partner. And with the apps, it makes it harder to fall in love because the apps cut off courtship. You know, you hook up, you know, and that blocks, courtship blocks falling in love.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So I'm not really sure. I haven't really studied that issue in detail. I don't know for sure why the millennials. But Gen Z is, I believe, going to be much, much worse for a lot of reasons. One is that the boys, oh, you know what? Let's pick up the boys because lots of parents have boys. I have a boy and a girl. We talked about girls. Let me briefly mention the boys.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So the boys, it's not that spending an hour on Instagram is gonna mess them up and make them mentally ill. For the boys, what social media does is it leads them to do all kinds of incredibly dangerous and destructive things. So a lot of the challenges, the stupid challenges on TikTok, most of the kids who've been killed are boys. dangerous thing, subway surfer.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
I mean, literally riding on top of subway cars and they get killed. The skull breaker challenge. You tell your friend to jump up and you kick his legs out so he lands on his head. Jumping kids in the hallway or the bathroom and beating them up so that your friend can film it. You can put it up online. I mean, it's sick, sick, horrible stuff.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So social media is hurting boys in a lot of ways, but it's not so much from just anxiety, depression, the way it is for girls. But the story for boys isn't really focused on social media. The story for boys is focused on their general retreat from the real world, which began in the 70s and 80s. Schools became more and more conducive to girls, not boys.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
The school year was longer, less recess, get rid of shop class, get rid of auto mechanics, get rid of all that stuff. the stuff that boys would be more interested, make them sit in their seat and learn math and English all day long. That's really hard on boys. So our schools have become less and less supportive and conducive to the way boys are.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And at the same time, while this was happening, the virtual world said, Hey boys, come on in, come on in. When I was a kid, video games were really primitive. We loved them, but they were very primitive. Every few years, they're like an order of magnitude better. Color monitors, fast action, lifelike video, music, multiplayer games. So the video games get more and more incredible.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
The boys get sucked in. The porn gets more and more incredible. High definition video of scenes chosen by algorithms because that's what turned other men on. So the porn is much more addictive, much more. I mean, I can't say it's more. I assume it's more aggressive and violent than it was when when I was, you know, when I was in the 70s.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Exactly, that's right. And so when, so here's the key thing. Kids need to work and then get the reward of the work. And the thing I most desired when I was in high school was a girlfriend. And it was really hard to get a girlfriend. And I made a lot of effort to do so. And I finally succeeded. And we had a, you know, gradual courtship. And I remember when I first held her hand, it was a big deal.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And so then I then got a contract to write a book closer to my own center of research. I study moral and political psychology. So I was gonna write a book on what social media is doing to democracy, that democracy is a conversation. And when the conversation happens on Twitter, what the hell happens to us? So I started writing that book and I thought, well, let me start the book.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So when you're making progress towards a goal, you get dopamine, you get a reinforcing chemical, but it's slow dopamine. It's like you work and you get the reward. It feels so good. That's what you want for your kids. But what's happening with boys is these companies say, hey, boys, you want quick dopamine? You want to play war? Here. War, you know, incredible, vivid war.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And you can get killed 30 times a day. You know, my son plays Fortnite. I kept him off in sixth and seventh grade, but let him on during the pandemic. You know, I mean, it's really powerful, attractive, addictive stuff, exciting. And the same thing for the porn.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And then, oh my God, and then all the vaping and the marijuana pens and the gambling and the sports betting and the crypto betting, all of it is gamified to hook boys. These giant industries are out there to grab your son's attention and suck it dry, leaving him nothing. And if it's gambling, leaving him broke.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Yeah, that's right. And so heterosexual relationships are hard enough. Boys and girls are different on average. The kind of the problems that come up in relationships in marriage therapy are often very gendered and very common across the decades. There are just some natural mismatches between the way men and women are in conversation, et cetera. Okay, that's the way it's always been.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Now add in that the girls are much more anxious, fragile, and defensive. So that's going to lead to more conflicts. Add in that the boys are more isolated, autistic, hard to make eye contact, have even worse social skills and worse social perception. How are boys and girls going to get together and do the hard work of dating and falling in love and staying together? It's looking pretty grim.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
oh but don't worry technology will rescue us you're lonely here create an ai girlfriend you can oh you want her to have these measurements tell us the measurements what color hair do you want her to be flirty brainy slutty whatever you want so of course the boys are going to be going for this and you know the girls as well because do you want someone who actually listens to you instead of bat bragging and boasting all day long yes please so
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
We're going to have the sexes getting their gratification from AI, and that means not much in the way of marriage, sex, and children.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
I have all this data left over on teen mental health. Let me start the book with one chapter on what happened to teenagers when they moved their social lives onto Instagram and a few other platforms around 2012. That's when Facebook buys Instagram. That's when it becomes very popular. So once they all get smartphones, which again is around 2012, their mental health plummets immediately.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Okay, but because you were one of the first to read it, it came out 11 months ago. Try it again in two months. What I'm saying is, okay, this is actually a good way to end. You know, I hear myself talking about doom and gloom. I hear these mega trends are horrific.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So the problem, this is, you know, I think this is one of the biggest problems we face, certainly at the level of global warming, any other issue you want to put up there. This is a global change in humanity, okay? But I'm actually really optimistic. And here's why. The book came out March 26th of last year, and it spread like wildfire around the world. And legislators read it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And just to give you one example, in South Australia, one of the Australian states, the premier of that state, his wife was reading the Anxious Generation book in bed. And she said to him, Peter, you've got to read this book, and then you've got to do something about it. And so he did, he read the book and he said, oh my God, we've got to stop this.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And he commissioned a report and they came up with really good legislation. And then the whole country of Australia adopted it. And Australia is gonna raise the age to 16. And in Australia and in the US and in the UK, it's totally bipartisan. because politicians, governors, presidents, everybody, they have children, they've all seen it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And so this is one of the few areas in American life where we've got a hard problem and we're united and we all see it and we're taking action. Now it's not, you're right, there's still gonna be parents who, you know, they wanna call their kid all the time, but the supertanker has turned, things are changing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And 11 months ago, if you tried to say, hey, let's all not give our kids smartphones, the people are like, what? But try it again in a month or two, or try it now. Everybody who has kids has been on some group where they're talking about the anxious generation. The ideas are getting out there. There's spontaneous action happening everywhere. Try it again now.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
You will find that you'll get a lot more support.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So I wrote the first chapter of that book, laying out all the graphs, like, look what happened. And then once I saw just how vast it was and that it wasn't just the US, that this was happening, not in every country, we don't have data from every country, but almost all the Western countries and certainly all of the English speaking countries, the identical pattern.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Look, AI is going to change things in some good ways and I think a lot of bad ways, especially sociologically. So I'm very concerned about what AI is going to do over the next five years.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
You know, I don't want to because I want to end on a positive note. And, you know, with AI, just briefly on kids, it means that all the current problems of social media are going to get a lot more intense. I just saw an AI company that will take whatever you want to post to make it super viral. So everything is going to get even more viral. Everything will get more attractive to our kids.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And AI is going to give us a kind of omnipotence. It's going to let us do anything because we'll have agents, AI agents that can do things for us in the world. And you don't want that for your kids. You don't want your kids to have lots of servants.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
You want your kids to work, struggle, learn to clean their rooms, make their own breakfast, do their own homework, and not have chat GPT righted for them. So I think AI is going to be a real problem. And that's why it is so crucial that we enact the four reforms this year in 2025, because we've got to establish the principle this year that children are not adults. We know that in the real world.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
There's all kinds of restrictions in the real world. But online, we're like, ah, you know, it's kind of hard. You know, what are we going to do? Ask for identification. Anyone can go anywhere. Just say you're 18. You can go anywhere. That's got to stop. And we've got to stop it this year, 2025. Australia is leading the charge. Australia is going to do it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
In the US, I don't expect that we'll do it. States are trying to do it, but they get held up in court. Meta supports lots of organizations that will just sue everybody who tries to do reform. But the thing is, we can do most of this without Congress. We can do it at the state level. Many other countries are doing it. And we can do it at the school level.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
I just spoke, when I was out in LA a month ago, I spoke to the Conference of California State Superintendents, one of the most enthusiastic, wonderful audience I've ever spoken to. They all see the problem. The phones are wreaking havoc in their schools, on test scores, they're trying to do a job and the phones and the computers is making impossible. So they were rallying to the cause.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And so what I'm saying is, Yes, this is a huge problem. It's a huge problem because we got pushed into it by collective forces. But the way we get out of it quickly is by acting together. So just keep trying. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Talk to especially the parents of your kids' friends. You will find them much more receptive now than they were 11 months ago.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Yeah, my son is 18 and he's a freshman at USC. And my daughter is 15 and she's a senior in a public high school in New York City.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
That I can't say. We loved the elementary school that my kids went to. It was just wonderful. We can't imagine anything better. Some of the private schools got really deeply into ideological stuff in the 2010s. And so that was part of our decision in New York City was like, there's no school we could send them to in New York. We don't want them exposed to all that, the political stuff. Mm-hmm.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
But I think the schools are loosening up now. And again, that's just elite schools in New York City, although LA is probably pretty similar. So I can't weigh in on that question.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So once I saw that chapter, I said, whoa, I can't just leave this in chapter one and go write a book about democracy. I've got to follow this out. And that's what became The Anxious Generation. I split the book in two. My editors were happy with that. And I ended up writing as fast as I could The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Yeah. TikTok is the most dangerous overall because that's the one that very effectively destroys attention. I can't, you know, again, it's not everybody, but a third of all kids, teens, say they're on social media almost all the time. So it's always in the hand. And TikTok is the most common of those apps. So I think TikTok... has destroyed more IQ points than anybody else.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
With that said, Snapchat has probably led to more deaths. So when kids die, it's usually from a drug overdose. They buy drugs on Snapchat, disappearing messages. So it's very easy to find drugs on Snapchat. And so cyberbullying and fentanyl are two ways that kids die from social media. And that, I think, I'm not certain, but I believe that's more Snapchat than Instagram or TikTok.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Those are the big three. There are other companies. Oh, I should just say, Pinterest is wonderful. The CEO of Pinterest, Bill Reddy, he reached out to me right after the book came out and he said, I love what you're doing. I agree with you. When he took over from a couple of years ago, He spontaneously turned off social features for under-16s.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
That is, he said, if a 12-year-old wants to get on Pinterest and look for fabric patterns or ways to decorate her room, great, let her on. But if she wants to be talking with strangers, text, you know, no, there's no reason. So he did that, didn't have to do it. The share price went down a bit at first because people thought, oh, he's going to lose market share. But guess what?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Safety is actually something that a lot of people want. And so since Pinterest, I never hear stories about girls whose lives were ruined by Pinterest. All the other three, yes. So my point is, it's not the screens per se, and it's not social media per se, but talking with strangers who are unverified and are often not who they say, this is just completely insane that we do this.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So that has to stop. And that's primarily happening on Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Yeah, no, that's right. Because those three companies are being sued by a lot of attorneys general, a lot of parents with dead kids. So a lot has come out from their own internal deliberations. And we know that those three companies, their employees have come to them and said, hey, we got problems. And then management says like, no, that solution would reduce engagement. Don't do it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
We can't do it. So those three companies have shown that they're very resistant to reform to protect kids. They talk a good game. They say, oh, we're doing this. Oh, we're doing that. Oh, we hired a thousand more content. But the problem isn't so much the content, the content moderation. The problem is the design.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
These things are designed to attract children and keep them on and take their childhood and break their attention into little tiny bits. It doesn't matter if all the content is nice. It's still going to do that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Let Grow, yes. So I do have to go, but thanks for giving me this opportunity to lay out where you can go for more information. So the central site for information is anxiousgeneration.com. That's the website for the book. We've got a huge number of resources. Also, my sub stack is afterbabel.com, B-A-B-E-L, afterbabel.com. That's where we put out our research articles.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
We have all kinds of great writers on there. So parents, teachers, please go to afterbabel.com. It's free. You don't have to pay any money. And then we have a special relationship with Let Grow. Go to letgrow.org, a wonderful organization. started, well, really, a couple of us said to Lenore Skenazy, hey, you need to up your game. The country needs you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And so we just made her more effective by giving her an organization rather than just being an author with a book. And Let Grow, we have a couple of simple programs. They're so powerful. The Let Grow experience, schools do it. It's transformative. You just tell the kids, go home, pick something you think you can do by yourself without your parents, but with your parents' permission.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Maybe it's make breakfast for yourself. Maybe it's make breakfast for the family. Maybe it's walk the dog. Maybe it's go to a store three blocks away. You're eight years old, you're nine years old. You think you can walk to a store three blocks in the afternoon and get a quart of milk?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And it's amazing what happens when they do it because they come back brimming with confidence that you see them change. It's wonderful. And it also changes the parents because the parents realize, wow, my nine-year-old kid actually can walk three blocks without getting lost or abducted and buy a quart of milk and come home.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
You know, all of us were doing that when we were seven or eight back in the 70s and 80s. But our nine-year-olds can do all sorts of things. So anyway, the Let Grow experience, super powerful. A couple of other ideas. So anxiousgeneration.com, afterbabble.com, and letgrow.org.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
My pleasure, Jen. Good luck to you with your kids and convincing some other families to go along with you and adopt the four norms.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So the data is clearest on a link between social media and girls. There, you can just look at just a simple correlation. The girls who spend a lot of time on social media are two or three times more depressed than the girls who spend little. That's a very, very crude measure, just how much time. For boys, there's a relation, but it's weaker. And so that's how I started. I thought, okay,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
The central thing here is social media is hurting girls because I was focused on the published literature. But as I got more and more into it, I realized there are many, many different harms that are not about the number of hours you spend. So, okay, let's do the boys. No, let's do the girls first. And then we'll move on to the boys.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So think about it this way. You're a company whose business model is based on monetizing children's attention. You've got to grab their eyeballs and keep them as long as you possibly can. What is the bait that you want to use in your trap? And the way a trap works is you have to have bait that appeals to the animal. You're not going to catch, you know, catch a dog using grapes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
I mean, they don't like grapes or whatever. Some dogs do, but you know.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So you need bait. And what's the bait for girls? If you want to get teenage girls in, what are you gonna show them? Who said what about whom? Who's friends with whom? What people said about you? Girls and women have a more developed mental map of social space. This is a common joke in every family. My wife remembers, knows all sorts of things about my friends that I've forgotten.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So girls and women are much more sociable in their social cognition. Boys and men are literally a bit more autistic. That is literally the difference. Males are sort of shifted over a bit on the spectrum. Not that they're autistic, but like towards that. High systemizer, low empathizer, not as socially skilled. So social media offers to girls what everyone is saying about everyone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And once the girls go in, they cannot leave. They're trapped. Because since that's where all the girls are, they're not in the hallway talking anymore. They're not going over to each other's house and talking anymore. Everything is happening on Instagram and a few other platforms. So the girls are trapped. And many girls are on there every waking moment. So that's how you trap a girl.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And then what are the effects of that? Well, the sheer waste of time, so many young women, that's basically all they do. If you're on social media five hours a day, which is the average, actually for girls it's a little higher than that, that's pretty much your life. And all the things that you and I remember from childhood, knock all those out.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Hanging out with friends, laughing with friends, reduce all that by 70, 80%. Being out in the sunshine, reduce it by reading books, having hot, everything. Everything in childhood, take out 70% or 80%. Oh, reduce your sleep, too. Lose about a half hour of sleep a night for your entire adolescence. So it just really does a number on girls. And that's not even talking about the predation.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
There are so many men that want to have sex with young girls and young boys. And they used to have to go to a playground where they would be creepy men, and then we locked them up in the 90s. Well, we didn't lock them all up. They're not on the playgrounds anymore. They're on Instagram. They're on Snapchat. That's the way it's so easy to meet children anonymously.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Get them to send you a photograph showing their breasts or their penis, and then you've got them. Once you've got that photograph, you can blackmail them. You can force them to do sex acts on camera. So it's horrific what is happening. Snapchat gets 10,000 reports of sextortion. Not a year, a month, every month. 10,000 reports. And that's just what's reported to them.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So social media puts kids into contact with strange men around the world. It's insane that we let this happen.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
You mean he wasn't convicted?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Right. That's right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Exactly. That's right. That's right. So for all these reasons, it just crept up on us that, you know, because it started in the 90s when the Internet came in and we all thought this is amazing. And it really was amazing. And the millennial generation, those born 1981 to 1995, roughly. Mm-hmm. They grew up with the internet, and some bad stuff definitely happened on the internet.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
But back then, it wasn't monetized. There weren't companies that had perfected locking you in and addicting you. So some bad stuff happened, but it was mostly very exciting, and the millennials turned out fine. And so we all kind of thought, oh, computers are... They're kind of good for kids and this is the future.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And so we didn't realize, we didn't realize that everything changed between 2010 and 2015. And this is the heart of my book. It's the great rewiring of childhood. So imagine that you are, let's say you're a girl born in 1995. So this is the last year of the millennial generation. So you turn 15 in 2010.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And what that means that you went through puberty with a flip phone because there was no smartphone until 2007. Teenage teens don't really dive into the smartphone. It's really 2011, 2012, the big transition years from flip phone to smartphone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So you're born in 1995, you're a millennial, you're most of the way done or halfway done really with puberty, but you're through early puberty, which is the most sensitive period. You probably had Facebook at some point, but Facebook wasn't super viral at the beginning. It was just like, hey, here's my page, where's your page?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
But then you get the newsfeed, you get algorithms, Facebook is able to monetize time. They didn't have a monetary strategy early on. It's really in the early 2010s that they perfect it. And then they buy Instagram, which all the girls go on to. There's a lot of publicity.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And so as kids are trading in their flip phones, they're getting a smartphone with a front-facing camera and Instagram and other platforms and Tumblr and Pinterest and other things. And they're getting high-speed internet. So now you can do photographs and video. But if you're... born in 1995, you made it through. You get this stuff in late teens, but that's not as bad.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Your brain is most of the way done rewiring. Okay, now what happens if you're born five years later? What happens to a girl born in the year 2000? So she's Gen Z. Gen Z begins birth year in 1996, but let's look at a girl born in 2000. So she turns 15 in 2015. What that means is that she probably got her first phone, it was probably an iPhone, say in 2012 when she was 12.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Back then, it might have been more 13, 14, but now it's 10. Kids are getting iPhones at 10 plus or minus. So her first phone is an iPhone. She just lies about her age when she's 12, opens an Instagram account because they welcome you. They're glad to have you. As far as I can tell, they certainly don't try to keep kids off. She has a front facing camera. All her friends are on Instagram.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And so now she's going through puberty, taking pictures of herself and putting them up there and trying to get followers. So, you know, the platforms are introducing you to people. Hey, you might want to follow this person. Hey. So she grows up basically on a stage showing off her body, showing off her face, having strangers comment on her body and her face.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
And the sexier she poses, the more positive reinforcement she gets. That's why all the girls look the same on Instagram. They're all doing the same sort of poses that come ultimately some of them from pornography. So again, it's just, it's unbelievable that we let this happen to childhood.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Yes. So I have a whole chapter, really two chapters that focus on play in the book. It's really important to understand our evolutionary story. So we're mammals. And what mammals are is mammals is a way of having huge investment in a child. So the female literally makes milk from her skin. I mean, it's a miracle, but that's what evolution figured out how to do.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So you've got these long childhoods where the female is literally producing food for the child. It goes on a long time. Mammals are very smart. We have large brains. And the smarter a mammal is, or the larger brains it is, the more sociable it is. So the really sociable animals, so humans, dogs, chimpanzees, they have big brains, very, very social. How do you wire up that brain?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
The genes don't tell it how to grow. The genes just start the ball rolling. The brain gets wired up in play. Mammal babies, mammal children practice the things they're going to need as adults. We have a puppy now. Well, she's two, but puppyish. They practice the, I'm going to grab the bone and run away with it. You have to chase me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
It's a game, but it lets her practice her grab the meat and run strategy. It's great fun. So we all play. And if you were, and study, research has, they've done this. You take rhesus monkeys and you don't let them play. You raise them without play. They come out socially deformed. They're anxious. You put them in a new environment. They're very fearful.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
They're kind of like those college students who showed up on campus in 2014, 2015. Much more fearful, much more anxious, much poorer social skills. So play is an absolute essential. If you think your kid needs vitamin C, of course he does. If you don't give your kid vitamin C, he's gonna develop rickets and have all kinds of deformities.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
We need vitamin C. Play is vitamin P. If you don't give your kids play, they're gonna come out anxious and socially stunted. And so the best kind of play is not with an adult, It's with other kids, ideally mixed ages, because then the older kids have to look out for the younger kids. The younger kids are trying to look mature for the older kids. They're not going to want to cry and be a baby.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
So when kids are playing in a group, that is the most nutritious thing that they can do. And most of us, you know, I'm older than you. I was born in 1963. But, you know, those of us born in the 60s and 70s or so in the 50s, you know, we all grew up outside playing with other kids. And there was a crime wave. I mean, it's not as though the world was perfectly safe back then.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
It was actually more dangerous. A lot safer now, very little crime now compared to when I was a kid. But kids need that play. And so my book is actually a tragedy in two acts. In act one, We eliminate the play-based childhood in the 1990s. We freak out about child abduction. We think if I ever let my kid out, he'll be abducted. There'll be a man in a white van.
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 Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | Mental Health Awareness
Something happened in the early 2010s. And my argument in the book is a tragedy in two acts. The first act is the loss of the play-based childhood. It's what anybody over 40 in this audience had. You were out with your friends after school. There was nobody supervising. You had to learn how to work out conflicts, how to face adversity.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | Mental Health Awareness
So that's what kids have had for hundreds of thousands of years. It's part of being a mammal. You play, you develop skills. We began to crack down on that, to lock kids up in the 90s, to not let them out. So we're restricting what they most need, which is play, from the 90s through the 2000s. But mental health doesn't collapse then. It's actually pretty stable.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | Mental Health Awareness
Then we get act two, which is the arrival of the phone-based childhood. And what that is, is in 2010, everybody had a flip phone. The iPhone had come out, but most teens had a flip phone, no front facing camera, no social media on the phone, no high speed data. And by 2020, 15, everyone's got all those other things.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | Mental Health Awareness
Now suddenly everyone has a smartphone, front facing camera, high speed internet, social media, especially Instagram on the phone. And almost like someone turned a switch in 2013, girls in America and many other countries suddenly become very anxious, depressed, and self harming.
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.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Yeah. No, thank you for that, Pete. AI is going to be the biggest technological change in human history, most likely, from what I read and what I hear. And I think it's going to affect our kids in two ways. The most immediate effect is that all the addictive parts of the technology are going to get a lot better.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
The video games are going to be even better at hooking your sons and keeping them there. The social media is going to be even better at sending your daughters and your sons whatever it is that will keep them going. So all the current problems are going to get a lot worse as AI comes in.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Generative AI is going to mean that we're going to be flooded by videos of people, you know, your child might be in a video and it might be her own voice and she might be naked and she had nothing to do with it. It's going to give everybody the ability to make a movie of anyone doing anything and saying anything in their voice. So that's really scary. That is scary.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Well, the news is that there will be a children's version of The Anxious Generation. Yay! Parents kept saying, is there something I can give to my fourth grader, my fifth grader? She wants a phone. Is there something I can give her? And so we had the idea to write a version of it that would be appropriate for 9, 10, 11-year-olds. But I'm a professor.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
The other major problem is that we're already seeing sites like Character AI making AI friends for us. So our kids got suddenly very lonely in 2012. That's when all the loneliness graphs go up. As soon as they move their social life from talking to their friends in person or on the telephone to swiping and posting and commenting, which is not real connection, that's when they got lonely.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
So what's the cure for the fact that the technology has made our kids so lonely? Oh, I guess the cure is artificial friends who will talk to your child and be very comforting and always there to listen. I can't think of a better way to stunt human development than to surround our kids with the perfect friends. When they hit teen years, it's going to be the perfect boyfriend or girlfriend.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
They will never be able to actually flirt with or interest or marry another person because they won't be ready for it. So we've We've got to understand AI is super powerful tools that we adults can use to make hard tasks easy. But we don't want to make life easy for our kids. We don't want to remove the awkwardness of flirting, of approaching a girl or a boy.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
We want them to experience that awkwardness thousands of times and they'll get over it. And then they'll be actually good at dealing with people.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
I'm not good at writing for elementary school students. And so I was already working with Catherine Price, who wrote How to Break Up with Your Phone. Yes. And who is an amazing public speaker. And it just turned out Catherine volunteered for the job and she is amazing at writing for children.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
That's right. So I want to say something to Natalie first, because Natalie, when you and I met with Oprah last spring, my wife and my sister were in the audience. And my wife was so moved by what you said. You said something like, I love you too much to insist that you like me, that you were willing to be the heavy, you were willing to endure his wrath and resentment.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Because in the long run, it's going to be so much better for him. And in the long run, he's probably going to love you more. He'll be able to love more. And that really influenced my wife, who was like crying while you were while you were speaking. And it's actually encouraged her to have a lot more back when I'm usually the softy with our daughter. But my wife is like, no, we got to hold firm.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
So I want to thank you for that.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
And I just want to say one thing to Mike, which is what a lot of us are noticing is that the kids who are raised without smartphones, they're really present. There's a coolness. There's a strength. They're like real people. Yeah. And the kids who are always on their phones are like non-playable characters on a video game.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
And so even though you feel excluded, you're being excluded from a world of losers, frankly. And in the long run, you are going to be cool because you're going to actually be able to be present. You're going to be a lot more attracted to girls, I'll tell you that. He's going to be able to connect. You can look them in the eye and have a conversation and connect. That's right.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Catherine, what would you add?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
I'd like to just add, my kids go to Brooklyn Tech High School here in New York. And I know that there was a chapter of the Luddite Club at Brooklyn Tech. I couldn't get my daughter to join it, but at least I feel somewhat connected to it from the fact that it is local for us. And I think one thing that Catherine and I are so thrilled by is if this is such a big problem, childhood has been rewired
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
We can't, to change this, we need everybody. We need the adults, the parents, the Congress people, the doctors, the teachers, the administration, we need everybody. But if the kids are silent and it's just, the adults are saying, oh, we got to save the kids. That's not so compelling to the kids.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
But when you have examples popping up all over the country, if you go to anxiousgeneration.com, we have a link to lots of aligned organizations, including a bunch of other ones that are started by Gen Z. So to see members of your generation stepping up and saying, no, this is bad for us. No matter how hard it is, we're finding the guts and the discipline.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
We're going to unplug and we're going to re-embrace life and childhood. So thank you. We're just so thrilled to see the example of your group. And the ludditeclub.org, if anyone is curious about it online.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Well, I'll start off by just saying this problem seems so big. And the main criticism I've gotten in the last year, there's almost nothing about how I got the story wrong. The criticism is almost always, oh, it's too late. Oh, it's hopeless. Oh, the technology is here to stay. But what we've seen since the book launched last April is that parents are fed up. Teachers are fed up.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
legislators are fed up because they're parents, and kids are fed up. So I'm incredibly optimistic that we are going to roll this back. The phone-based childhood only arrived 12 years ago. It hasn't been there that long. We can get rid of it, and I think we're going to. Catherine, what would you add?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Yeah, but actually, they are aware of what they're missing. Are they? Because they've seen movies from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. They know what their parents' childhood and their grandparents' childhood was like. They're nostalgic for the childhood of the 1980s and 90s when kids did get to go out. So they know that they missed it. They've seen it in movies, and they lament it. It's painful.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
I am incredibly optimistic that we are going to roll this back. The phone-based childhood only arrived 12 years ago. We can get rid of it, and I think we're going to.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
No, that's right. So you know what? I'll say a word about dopamine, which is the key idea here. And then actually I'd love Catherine to explain how we're explaining. She's doing the main writing. How we're explaining these scientific concepts to kids in multiple ways. Okay. So the key thing to keep your eye on here is a neurotransmitter in the brain called dopamine.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
which we get a little pulse of it whenever we do something which is good for us in terms of like biological, like we get food or sex or even companionship. We get a little bit of dopamine that tells us, ooh, that was good, do it again. Ooh, that was good, do it again. And so if you work for something and then you get that, that's great.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
That's what you want for your child to learn that work pays off. But what they did in Silicon Valley was they figured out how to hack the system How can we give kids a little hit of dopamine without them doing anything hard? Like, oh, just swipe, oh, something's entertaining. Swipe, oh, somebody liked your post.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
So what they've done is they've figured out how to tap into our kids' reward systems, give them lots of quick little hits of dopamine, which makes them all addicted, or the great majority of our kids are literally addicted. It's as though they passed out candy that was laced with cocaine. The kids took it. It was sweet. It made them feel really good.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
And then they get really upset when you take the candy away because they are literally addicted. That is what has happened at a global scale to our children.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Yes, that's right. That's right. For girls, they do it through social media. For girls, they do it with social rewards. And for boys, they do it especially with video games and pornography and gambling and vaping. Well, vaping is separate. But the point is the addiction is really devastating for the boys. And the social media, I think, is more devastating for the girls.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Catherine, how are you explaining it in the book? Go ahead, Catherine. What do you want to say?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
I'll just start by saying first, does your son have a flip phone or a basic phone now or does he have nothing?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
Okay. Well, I would suggest that if he's still in middle school, don't give him a smartphone. Give him a better basic phone. There's the light phone, the gab phone. There are a lot of phones that have some functions. It's fine for your kid to be texting with his friends. It's not fine for strangers to be interacting with your son over Snapchat or Instagram or TikTok. That is not fine.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Kids Can Choose Fun and Freedom in a Screen Filled World
And so, yeah, so don't just assume that you have to go right to a smartphone in middle school. Catherine, what would you say?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
That's a very good start. If he sees that there's a problem, then it's going to definitely be possible to solve it. And so, Carrie, you're absolutely right to worry about his mental health. Now, for girls, the connection between social media use and depression, anxiety is much stronger.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
It sounds like, Nick, are you suffering from depression or anxiety right now, or is that not really your issue now?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Okay. Because what I see happening is we focused a lot on social media and girls because that's a very strong connection. That's really devastating the girls. And it took me a while to realize while I was writing the book that the story for boys is actually very different and addiction is at the center. So, uh, uh, uh, Carrie, Nick, do you know the word dopamine? Do you know what dopamine means?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
The neurotransmitter? Yes. Okay.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Well, so what it really is, what dopamine is, it's said to be the reward neurotransmitter because it makes us feel good. But the key thing is it's the motivation neurotransmitter. So when you do something and then you get a reward, you then are motivated to do it again. And then you get the reward and you dig yourself deeper and deeper. And if you do it a lot, your dopamine neurons adapt.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
They're trying to get back to a normal level. So they become less sensitive to dopamine. So now you need more and more dopamine. So Nick, what happens if you are separated from your phone for an hour or two? Is that no problem or do you start to feel something?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Okay. What happens to you when you go hours without it?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
We have to change the way we're raising kids. We have to give them back an exciting, fun childhood in the real world, not on a screen.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Okay. That's a separate issue, which is a very serious issue, which is that all of this ed tech, all of these screens in front of students, it turns out is really bad for their education. Test scores have been dropping around the world since 2012 in part because of the educational technology. But let's get back to the question of addiction.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Because, Nick, what you said, I was about to say, oh, good. Well, then it's not really addiction. It's just a habit. But what Carrie said tells me that you are addicted. Your brain is addicted. And here's how I know. Because Anna Lemke, one of our country's foremost experts on addiction, she wrote the book Dopamine Nation.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
She says the five universal symptoms of withdrawal from an addictive substance. This is what happens to addicts when you take away the drug for a day. Here are the five. Irritability, insomnia, dysphoria, craving, and anxiety. And it sounds like you've got most of those, which tells me that your brain is dependent on constant stimulation. Are you able to read a book?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Can you read a whole book, like, you know, an hour at a time paying attention, or is that hard for you?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Okay, so Nick, what I'm gonna recommend for you is what I'm just drawing from what the experts say, is if this is a dopamine issue, and clearly it is, then the way to break it is to go a month without it. You have to go through detox. The first few days, the first week will be hard, but then what you're gonna find, and this is what my students at NYU find, your life opens up.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
You can pay attention. You have more time in your day. You experience things. So if you can find a way, the two of you working together, Ideally, you could start it if you can take a vacation somewhere, if you could send him to some sort of summer thing for a week or two or a month, summer camp or some experience. That really helps. So make the real world interesting as possible.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
But what would really help you is going a month to let your brain reset itself to a normal setting.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
How nice to be back talking with you.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Nick, do you think you could do that or is that impossible?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's the way to think about it. So, Nick, let me ask you a question. Do you want someday to get married? Do you want to have a girlfriend and a wife or a spouse? Is that something you want? Yeah. Okay. Do you think that a woman would find appealing a man who is on TikTok all day long and is not capable of paying attention? No. 100% no.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
And do you want to have a job someday? Do you want to earn money and support yourself, support a family? Yeah. And do you think any employer's gonna find it useful to hire someone who can't focus on what they're supposed to focus on and is always on multiple screens and watching videos?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
They don't want that. So it is urgent that you restore your brain. You're still young. The damage is not permanent yet. But if you do this until you're 25, then the damage might be permanent. Your brain is very flexible still. for a few more years. But by 25, the frontal cortex is kind of done changing over to the adult pattern.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
At that point, it's going to be much harder to get your attention back. So start now.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Yeah. So think about like learning languages. You know, we can learn a language without an accent before we're 13 because what the brain is doing, it's in the child form. It's very flexible. It can become lots of things and it can become a native speaker of Spanish or Russian or Chinese or anything.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
But then as you go through puberty, different parts of the brain start locking down as where they start assuming the adult pattern. And there's a kind of a myelin sheath. There's a sheath around the neurons that kind of makes them more efficient, but less flexible.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
and so that's going forward in your brain and the last part of the brain to lock down is the prefrontal cortex that's the area that does focus attention planning that is absolutely vital for being an adult and all over the country you are not alone half at least half of americans are giving that up. They're saying, let's let TikTok shape my frontal cortex so I never have to think.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
If you do that till you're 25, I can't say for sure, but it sure looks like it's going to be permanent.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
I mean, it's a gradual thing in your early 20s. So the sooner you start, the better. But by 25, it's locked into adult position, yes.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Yeah, that's right. That's the question. And that's why everyone's trapped, because that's true for everyone. We all got sucked into this because we all felt like we had to give our kids a phone and Snapchat because they say, everyone else has it. I am left out. And so what we're trying to do, what my team and I are trying to do is get everyone to realize we're trapped.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
And Nick, you realize that, that you're trapped. And the way to escape from a social trap is together. So if you could find three other families, three friends to do this with, and I bet you can, you might think that you don't know three where the parents would be receptive, the kid would be receptive, but I guarantee you things are changing fast this year. You will find them.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Well, thanks, Oprah. It's very easy to answer that question. The answer is that all over the world, all over the developed world at least, family life has become a fight over screen time. It wasn't like this in 2010. I mean, we fought over television a little bit, but it's once our kids all got iPads, iPhones, social media apps, and that all happened around 2012.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
If you can do this with a few friends and instead of just sitting there swiping, you go out and do fun stuff. You go places with your friends. You can go to an amusement park, go shopping, go to a beach. Does he replace the smartphone with the flip phone? Oh, thank you. Thank you, Oprah. Yes. So by all means, talk to your friends. Talking to your friends one at a time on the phone is great.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
And so a flip phone, a basic phone, that way you and your mom can keep in touch. You and your friends can keep in touch. And now your computer. I'm not saying go without a computer. I understand. For work, for school, the computer is essential. But a computer is not as addictive as a touch screen. The touchscreen is stimulus, response, reward, stimulus, response, reward, infinite loops.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Computer's a little slower. It's not quite as addictive. So I'm not asking you to give up communication. You can have a flip phone. I'm not asking you to give up all sorts of other things on your computer. I'm saying it sounds like you're going to need to take a break from your smartphone for a while. There's also a program called Brick. It's a little device.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
You can block almost every app and just use it for whatever the few apps you need. So there are ways to do that, but I would recommend going cold turkey for a month if you can.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
It's been a fight over screen time. We all hate it. We're all feeling trapped. We're all looking for a way out. And I think that's why the book has been a bestseller around the world.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Absolutely. Absolutely. Let me share with you two horrific stats. And you might expect this to be the suicide stats that you and I talked about last time, you know, up 50 percent for adolescents since 2010, up 140 percent for younger teen girls. Those are horrific. But there are two other numbers I can't get out of my mind.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
That's right. Wow, there's so much in that question. I'll start with two points. One is that you notice the big effect of these platforms, which is they take all of your child's attention. That's the way they're designed. The reason why these companies are worth trillions of dollars, we don't give them any money.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
It's all because they drilled into our kids' heads, they extracted all of our kids' attention and sold it. So when your kids are on social media, they're not present. They're not really with you. They're gone. And you saw that quite dramatically when you took the phone away for a month.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Second point that I think you made, which is very important, is that a lot of the worst stuff is happening when she's alone in her room. That's what I hear. That's when the really bad stuff tends to happen because they feel like they can talk to anyone. It's late at night. So I'll share with you my biggest regret about my own parenting.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
I was so focused on social media, I didn't really think about the computer. And this was during COVID too, you know, they all had to have a computer. But here's the policy that I wish I had had, and I recommend this to everybody who has young kids especially, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
One is 48%, which is the percentage of our adolescents in America who say that they are online almost constantly. The phone is always in their hand. They're always checking it. Even if they're talking with you, they're thinking about what's on the phone. They are checked out of life. They're never fully present. They're almost constantly involved in social media.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
That's one number, 48% of our teens that's happened to. And then what I just found yesterday, which I can't believe, but here it is, 40 percent. That's the number of two-year-olds, two-year-olds in this country, who have their own iPad, their own iPad.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Which means that in the last few years, what that means is that Americans, and it's the same thing in Britain, I know, Americans have basically realized, hey, if I just give the kid an iPad, I can have some peace. I can check my email. I can make dinner. And we're using it as a babysitter. So yes, you ask me, is it addiction? Yes.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
From the age of two all the way through the teen years, at least half our kids are hooked.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
That's right. I'm hearing from more and more preschool teachers who say that kids are showing up with language delays, they're not ready for school. A lot of them aren't potty trained yet. So an iPad is not a babysitter. We have used it as a babysitter because it seems to be effective. But you know what? Opium and alcohol would be effective too at calming your child. We shouldn't be using them.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
So, yeah, that's why we've got to change quickly. We don't have five years to change this. We have to change this year, 2025. We have to change the way we're raising kids. We have to give them back an exciting, fun childhood in the real world, not on a screen.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
I think the best way to understand it is for older people, at least if you were, say, 35 years old or older, you probably grew up playing outside with friends. You had some freedom. And so I'd like everyone watching, think back about the most exciting, wonderful things that you did as a kid. What are your best memories?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Well, I think there's no law that says that you have to give them all the same platforms and all the same iPads and smartphones. What I'm advocating for is that we all adopt some simple rules. No smartphone before high school, no social media before 16. But the threats to your kids are different.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
And you as the mother, as any parent, you have to defend your kids against the threats that are coming for them. And so I don't think, are your kids demanding that if you block something for one, you have to block it for the other? If they're saying that, that's just something kids say. Kids are really good at being lawyers and making arguments about why what you're doing is unfair.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
But they'll understand. Just from what your kids have said already, it's clear. They understand what's going on.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Oh, yeah. That's the key. When we try to do this alone as one family, then, yeah, your kids are going to feel isolated. Now, that still might be the best for them. That's the decision that I've made for my daughter, and it's very hard. But if you can do this with just a couple other families, it's a lot easier.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Focus on giving your kids a great childhood with lots of fun, exciting things in the real world. Don't just focus on the screens. But I know the screens are where we're all fighting about now.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Thank you so much.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
So let me give you just a couple of suggestions. So one helpful suggestion is to say it's not screens per se. It's not that you have to keep your kid away from every screen. Keep in mind that stories are good things. Humans are a storytelling species. We've always told stories around the campfire.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
So if you want to watch a movie, a 90-minute movie with your child, or let a couple of kids watch a movie together, that's great. It's social. It's a story. It goes on a long time. But fragmenting time, iPad time, that's not a story. That doesn't build concentration. That builds distraction.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
And so it's really the private touchscreen, an iPad or an iPhone in a kid's hand, it's constant distraction and interruption. So that should be kept to a minimum. I would say don't even give them their own one until high school, really. You know, you can let them watch, use your iPad on a long car trip, but don't give them their own private iPad or iPhone until they are in high school.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
You can give them a flip phone earlier or a basic phone watch. So I'm not saying remove all screens from life. You're going to let your kids watch TV sometimes. A TV is much better than an iPad or an iPhone.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
OK, now let's go through it and let's see what it's like for that half of our kids who are online almost all the time. What's it like for them? So did you ever laugh with your friends? Do you ever share a laugh with your friends? Of course. I just did a quick calculation before we talked here.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
The other important thing I would want to leave everyone with is, and we've talked about this a lot in this session, how important it is to find other families or community or church group or anything to do this with. Because what our kids fear most, they don't fear getting cancer. They don't fear getting brain damage. They fear being isolated. They fear being left out.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
They fear being made fun of. And so when they feel alone, they panic. And so I don't, I'm not saying go out there and tell your kid, I'm taking away your phone and your social media account now, and you're going to disappear from, so I'm not saying do that. But if you can find a few other families that will do that, this is going to be happening all, it is happening all over the world now.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
This is the year, 24, 25. This is when the world is waking up to the fact that we cannot raise children on touchscreens. It is damaging their brain development. So we've got to stop. And if we do it together, we can actually do it.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Somewhere between 200,000 times and a million times is probably about the number of laughs that we shared with a friend. Imagine cutting that by 90%. Take 90% of it out of your child's life. Because they don't see their friends very much. And typing LOL is not the same as laughing hysterically with your friends. Did you ever look out a car window and just daydream? Did you ever do?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Of course we did. We all did that. Okay. Imagine taking out 100% of that. Because now as soon as the kid gets in the car, they have a device. They're on the device the whole way.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Did you ever play outside? Cut 70% of that. Did you ever read a book? Cut 60% of that. Did you ever have a hobby? Cut 80% of that. So when our kids are online about 8, 10, 12 hours a day, there isn't time for anything else. It pushes everything out of childhood. And that is a sad childhood. We've got to stop this.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Well, that's right. And the last time you and I spoke, we focused on mental illness, anxiety, depression, and we're going to talk a lot about that today. That's really, really important. But what I've learned since you and I last spoke is that I think an even bigger harm that happened to our kids is the destruction of their ability to pay attention.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Because we're not just talking about 10, 20 percent of the kids. We're talking about most of them. I teach at New York University, very smart kids here in the business school. A lot of them say they have a lot of trouble reading. As one of my students said, I read a sentence, I get bored, I take out TikTok. That's the way it's always been. TikTok has always been there for them.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
And it's almost always, it's always more entertaining than whatever reading I could assign to them. So yeah, their attention is fragmented, shattered.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Yeah, because look, we all want to protect our kids. I have a daughter, 15, and a son, 18. We all want to protect them, but we've got to protect them from the right things. When you and I were growing up, Oprah, there was a crime wave. There was real danger. But kids still played outside. It didn't usually hit the kids that much. So kids still played outside. All kids played outside.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
And when we were together, we were safe. Since you and I were kids, the crime rate has plummeted. It's much safer now. There's much less drunk driving. And child molesters, we started locking them up. We didn't used to lock them up when you and I were kids. We thought they were just eccentrics. So the physical world, the real world, is actually safer than it was 40, 50 years ago.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Crime went way down in the 90s. Where did all the child molesters go? They went onto Instagram. Yes, Lord. Because that's where it's really, really easy to talk with children and to ask them for a photograph and maybe a photograph of them in their bikini. And before you know it, you have a naked photo of them and you can set forth them.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Exactly. So what I'm trying to say is that we've got to lighten up, loosen up, let our kids out into the real world where it's actually much safer. And that's where children need to develop. They need to play with each other in person. And we've got to tighten up on the online world where there are lots of strangers talking to your child if she's on social media.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
Yeah. So first, let's just look at how young women and young men are socially. Girls are much more interested in their relationships. They need a few good friends. They talk a lot. Boys don't talk as much. Boys do things together in larger groups.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
And so social media, it has been completely devastating for girls because the way a friendship develops is you share secrets, you talk one-on-one, you talk in a small group, you gossip. But on social media, it's this giant conversation. People are performing. They're not really connecting. And this is happening in middle school, especially at a time when girls are just beginning to develop.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
They're just starting puberty. They're very self-conscious about their bodies. And what are people talking about? Your face, your hair, your boobs, your skin. It's so sad to me how it pushes girls to be sexual and shallow. I just opened an account on Snapchat because my daughter wants Snapchat. So I opened an account for myself pretending to be a 14-year-old boy.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
I can't believe what it makes the girls do. It's disgusting. And so if you're gonna go through puberty on Snapchat or Instagram or TikTok, it's gonna be bad for girls. Now for boys, it's not as emotionally damaging But boys get sucked into crazy, destructive behavior. And it's things like, let's attack some kid so that we can get a video of it and post it.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
And again, it's dehumanizing, it's degrading. So this is why I say, no kid should be on any of these social media platforms until at least 16. This is just not appropriate for children. You cannot make this stuff safe for children.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
No, she is not. I will not let her on Snapchat. What I've seen is so disgusting. It's not pornography. I'm not seeing pornography. But what I'm seeing is that it makes the girls all pose in this sexy, semi-porn way. It just pushes the girls to be shallow and sexy. There's no way I'm letting my daughter on Snapchat. Oh, and also Snapchat keeps pushing me to connect with people I don't know.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
And that's how you get in the... That's how you start talking to adults in other countries who want money or sex from you. That's right.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Jonathan Haidt on How Social Media Is Changing Childhood
It is urgent that you restore your brain. You're still young, but if you do this until you're 25, then the damage might be permanent.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
You're spending all this time posting pictures of yourself. People are commenting on it. It makes you anxious. And a whole bunch of ways, kids who went through puberty on a smartphone were kind of blocked. They didn't get to do the things that kids normally do. And that is the story that I'm telling in the book about why we see this very sudden
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
increase in depression and anxiety and self-harm and suicide right around 2012.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
That's right. So I love metaphors. And I, you know, in my teaching and my writing, I always try to try to give people a kind of a feeling for the phenomena with a good metaphor. So the metaphor that I chose for this after working on this for years is. was what if your nine-year-old daughter comes to you and says, Mommy, Daddy, I've signed up for a trip to Mars.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
You know, even if like, you know, I always wanted to be an astronaut when I was when I was a kid. So even imagine that, you know, I was willing to say, well, OK, let me hear you out. It turns out that the people running this space colony, they don't give a damn about kids. They didn't they have no idea if the kids are going to be OK. They didn't even ask the question. They didn't do any testing.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
They just want to get as many kids as they can, bring them to Mars, let them grow up there. And then maybe they'll send them back when they're adults, maybe not. So this is a horrible situation. We'd never let that happen. But that's kind of what happened when we gave our kids smartphones and Instagram and all these other apps. And then those companies now own our children's lives.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Not for everybody, but half of all teenagers say they're online almost constantly. About half of them are basically on social media most of the time. So half of our kids, in a sense, have gone off to this different way of growing up. Now, you might have said back then, well, maybe it's okay. Maybe, you know, the technology would be good for them. Maybe they'll be super social.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
And I thought that back in 2010, like maybe this is going to like stimulate brain development. But now it looks like it had a devastating effect, not just in the U.S. The reason I'm so passionate about this is that it's not just us. The exact same thing happened in Canada, the U.K., Australia, Scandinavia. We have good data from a lot of countries.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Something happened to kids around 2012 in so many different countries. So that's why I was trying to convey the sense of kids being taken away by a foreign – you know, company trying to make money off our kids. And they're coming, many of them are harmed or damaged or blocked.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Yeah. So let me address this both to the young men and the young women who are listening, that is those who are in their 20s. Gen Z is turning 30 this year. So if you're in your 20s, you're Gen Z. And I also especially want to address everybody who has a son or a daughter. And so the girl's story and the boy's story are different. I didn't know this when I started writing the book.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
I thought the story was going to be social media is really bad for kids' mental health. And it turns out that the connections between social media and depression and anxiety for girls is really strong. Girls who spend a lot of time on social media are two or three times more likely to be depressed or anxious. For boys, they're a little more likely, but not that much.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
So it looked like social media is really particularly bad for girls. Why is it so bad for girls? If you want to trap a girl, if you're a company, you want to extract all the attention from a girl and sell her advertisements. How do you trap girls? You offer them bait. As you guys would know, how do you attract an animal? Well, a trap, you have to put bait that the animal finds attractive.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
But then the trick is when the animal takes the bait, now something changes and they can't get out. That's what a trap is.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
girls what you put in the trap is social information who said what about whom who's dating whom who's mad at whom and girls girls care more about social relationships they're more sensitive to it so the girls will go rushing onto instagram they're all talking about each other they're all talking to each other now they're trapped because any girl who says wait this is crazy this is terrible i want to be out playing that girl's now alone because everybody's on instagram
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
So the girls get trapped by social media, especially Instagram, but there's a few others. And then now they're not spending time with their friends as much. What girls need is a couple of close friends. If they have a few close friends to talk with, to gossip with, to comfort each other, they're probably gonna turn out fine.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
But what social media does is says, how about you spend five hours a day on this platform interacting with hundreds of people so you don't have any time for your real friends and you're not going to see them much. You're not going to laugh with them much. You're just going to share emojis. So that's what it's doing to girls.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Oh, plus the incredible amount of sexual harassment of girls and plus the social comparison and the constant comments on their face, their hair, their breasts, everything. It's a terrible thing to do to an 11, 12, 13 year old girl to put her on social media. So that's the girl's story. And at first I thought that's what most of the book would be about.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
And I thought, well, the boys aren't doing as badly and they're not as depressed and anxious. So if you look at the kids when they're 14, the girls look like they're doing worse than they are at 14. Boys are playing a lot of video games, which are great fun, and they're watching a lot of porn. But what is the effect on the boys if they spend their childhood playing video games and watching porn?
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
They're not doing anything else. So here's the most shocking stat in the book, I think. When you look at the rates of hospital admissions for broken bones, how many kids in America break a bone and go to the hospital? Who do you think used to break bones the most? Young people, old people, boys, girls? Who are the people who are ending up in hospitals with broken bones? Teenage boys, right?
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
That's what it used to be. Teenage boys used to have by far the highest rates of broken bones until about 2010, 2012. Then what happens?
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Once the teenage boys are all spending their time now on video games and also on their smartphones, and they are on social media too, but once everything is on the screen, teenage boys' rates drop so low that they are now less likely to break a bone than their fathers or grandfathers because teenage boys aren't doing anything that's risky.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
And if boys aren't doing anything risky, if they're playing it safe, They're not going to turn into men, or at least it's going to be harder, I should say. Boys need to take more risks. They need to learn how to manage risk. They need to have conflicts in the real world and learn to manage them. They need to do sports. And the video games are great fun, but they don't really help the boys develop.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
They don't develop skills. So what we're finding is that if you'll check in on kids when they're in their late 20s, The girls, they finished their education. They're more likely to have gone to college. They're more likely to have a job. Who's more likely to be living with their parents at the age of 30? It's the boys. So the boys' story is not about social media so much.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
It's about missing out on all the things that are going to turn boys into men and instead spending thousands and thousands of hours on video games, porn, and YouTube videos, short videos on TikTok.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Yeah. Oh, thank you, Zach. Yeah, because, you know, the conversations tend to focus on the phones. That's what everyone's interested in, what the hell's happening to our kids with all these screens. But thank you for pointing that out, that the book isn't really about screens. It's actually about childhood, and there's two pieces to it. I can summarize the whole book with this sentence.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
We have overprotected our children in the real world, and we have underprotected them online. So when, you know, when us older folk, you know, I'm 61.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Okay. We have overprotected our children in the real world where it's actually much safer than it used to be and where they need to take risks. And we have underprotected them online, which is actually a kind of a dangerous place where a lot of men are trying to get to your kids and all kinds of bad things happen. So we have to work on both of those. And so –
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
You know, when me and Al and Jace were growing up in the 70s, there was a huge crime wave. I don't know what it was like for you guys in Louisiana, but I grew up in the suburbs of New York and the whole area. You know, there was a lot of crazy stuff and a lot of drunk drivers. Some of those drunk drivers were us. I mean, we just took a lot of risks and life was kind of dangerous.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
But all kids went out to play. Right. Am I right? At age seven, eight, nine, we were all out playing.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Every day. That's right. And if you tried to come back, your mom might say, get out of here. Don't watch television. Get out of here. Don't come back until dark. Don't come back until dinnertime.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
We were out playing. But that's kind of like what hunter-gatherer childhood is like. If you look at ancient societies, the adults aren't watching the kids. The kids are socializing among themselves, and they're teaching each other, and they're inventing games. And one of the most valuable things groups of kids can do is... is get into an argument about, well, what should we do?
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Or, okay, we're playing this game, but you broke the rules. No, I didn't. Like all that stuff is pure gold for social development. This is how kids learn to be citizens in a democracy where we're gonna disagree and the majority is probably gonna win, but you don't wanna crush the minority because you want the game to keep going, you wanna keep the group together.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
So these are such crucial skills to learn, but we only learn those skills when we're not supervised by grownups. Because if you watch kids today on the playground, there's always, it's so sad, I don't know what it's like there, but in New York City, you go to a playground here, we got great playgrounds, What are you gonna see?
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
You're gonna see one or two parents standing near the equipment, talking to their child who's on the equipment. You don't see the kids playing with each other. It's all, each individual child is being watched carefully so that they don't fall or something like that. We're so overprotective. And we're blocking those, just the unsupervised play.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
So what I'm arguing is that, in fact, what I show with a lot of evidence in the book is that kids used to play outside. They used to be unsupervised a lot until the 1990s. That's the decade when we freak out in America and we say, if I ever let my kid out, he's going to be abducted.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
A lot of parents now start saying, I can't even let my kid go two aisles over in a grocery store because I heard that a kid was abducted from a gross, which never happened. OK, there was actually one case. There was one case in 1980, which sort of was like that one case. But people freak out in the 90s. And we don't trust our neighbors anymore. We've lost a lot of trust in our neighbors.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
And what that means is that we have to supervise our kids all the time. And that falls on the mothers mostly. Mothers start spending a lot more time parenting, being with their kids. It's not good for the kids. It's not good for the mothers. The kids need to be out with each other. So that's the first piece of it. That starts in the 90s.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
And then by the time we get to 2010, outdoor play is really reduced. Kids aren't doing a lot outdoor. They're spending a lot of time on the internet, on computers. And then when they get social media and smartphones, 2010 to 2015, that's when their mental health collapses. So that's the story that I tell in the book. There's two pieces to it.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Yes.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
That's right. That's exactly right. So Jean Twenge is a professor in California at the University of San Diego. I'm sorry, San Diego State University. And she's a friend of mine. And
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
When I was writing The Coddling of the American Mind, I was talking about overprotection, but I noticed, Greg Lukianoff, my co-author, we noticed that social media might have something to do with this, but we didn't know. We didn't know. It was 2017.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
And then Jean's book comes out, iGen, and she's got graph after graph showing just what Zach just said, that all the mental health problems, they all sort of track the degree to which kids are spending time on smartphones. in social media. Now, what Gene showed is what's called correlation. That is, this happened and this happened at the same time.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
And in the sciences and in medicine, that's the starting point for an investigation. Like, okay, these two things happened together. Did one cause the other? We don't know. We can't be sure. Lots of other things happened in the early 2010s. Maybe it's something else.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
And so what Jean and I have both been doing since then is collecting the evidence that it was the phone-based childhood, growing up on a phone, is what caused the mental health and other problems. And we think we've got a lot of different kinds of evidence. I'll tell you, one of the most shocking kinds of evidence is... The words of the companies themselves.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
There's a lot that's come out because so many parents have lost their kids to suicide, cyberbullying, drug overdoses from fentanyl-laced drugs that they got on social media. So all these parents are suing Meta and Snapchat and TikTok, and a lot of documents have come out from those lawsuits. And so my group and our substack, our blog at afterbabble.com,
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
We've collected just TikTok in its own words. And it is absolutely shocking what they said in their internal emails and their internal reports. They know that their product is addictive. It was designed to be addictive. They know that it's shattering kids' attention. It was designed to grab every little bit of consciousness it could.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
So from all three of those companies, we have all kinds of quotes. They know they're doing this. Here's another piece of evidence. What do you think the founders of these companies do with their own kids? Do you suppose they give them smartphones and TikTok? Hell no. They keep their kids off. It's well known in Silicon Valley,
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
A lot of the executives at these tech companies, they send their kids to a school called the Waldorf School because it has no technology. These people know that this stuff is bad for kids. So they don't give it to their kids, but they want to give it to your kids because that's how they make their money.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
So there's also a lot of scientific evidence and there are experiments, but everything's lining up to say it wasn't just a coincidence. Growing up on a smartphone, social media, blocks child development, blocks social development. You get kids who are more anxious, fragile, and full of problems.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
I don't know, is it Acts?
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Oh, wow. Wow.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Ooh, you call it embodied. That's great. Okay. I'm writing that down.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
I remember that when I was a kid.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Absolutely. Oh, my goodness. I love Martin Gury. And let's go into this. This is fascinating because I didn't know about Acts 2, but I but I was very moved by the Genesis story in the Bible story in Genesis. And so, you know, because my own work before I was I set out to write a book. on what social media is doing to democracy. Because our country has been weird since sometime in the 2010s.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
It's not like it used to be. Something weird is going on with our politics. The rising polarization, everybody believes something different. And so I was looking around for metaphor. I love metaphors. And I was trying to, I was starting this book. The title of the book is, well, okay. So I was starting the book and I was looking for metaphor and I reread the Babel story.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
And when I got to that line, God says, let us go down and confound their language so that they may not understand one another. Boom. That's it. That's it. Because I always thought, you know, so I'm, you know, I'm Jewish. I grew up not very religious. I had a slight acquaintance with the Babel story. I always thought God knocked over the tower.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
But, you know, in the story, in the book, he just confuses their language so that they can't understand. And that's the way you shatter a community. And so that's why I picked the title for the blog, After Babel. And the title of the book I was gonna write is Life After Babel, Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
And this is what Martin Gorey was talking to you about, because I drew on him. He talks about how, you know, the mass media age 50 years ago, the newspapers and television, we might all see the same TV show. We might all have the same understanding. We'll have our disagreements, but we have a body of shared facts. Not anymore. Now that we're all on social media, Everything is fragmented.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
And so the problem is the loss of any sense of community. So I'm so excited to hear about – I'll go check out Acts 2 because I think you're right. The way we fix this, or at least the way we bring some little bubbles of sanity to our lives, is going to be much more local. And local parish churches is a great idea.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Which one was it? Do you remember the name?
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Oh, yes. Snapchat brings so much degrading stuff to kids.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
What I was surprised... Wait, how did it go? Did they respond?
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Oh, that's fantastic.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
So, Jace, that is a beautiful story because you basically figured out intuitively the conclusions I came to in the book after all this research. The problem is that each of us as parents acting alone, if we say, no, you can't have Snapchat. And I said that to my daughter. She's 15. She says, Dad, but everybody in my school has it. Everybody else has it except for me.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
So, if you're acting alone, your kid's isolated.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
But the solution is that we act together. And so here are the four norms. This is the last third of the book. Even though this problem is gigantic, we can actually solve it if we do these four things together. Most of us, we don't need everybody, but if most people do this, we solve the problem. The first, no smartphone before high school or age 14.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
You can give your kid a flip phone if you want to communicate with them, but nothing with a browser or social media platforms. No smartphone before 14. Let them get through early puberty first. The second is no social media until 16. Social media is designed to introduce your children to strangers. They will be talking to strangers. That's what it's there for. It's insane.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Children shouldn't be talking to strangers, okay? So it's just, you know, really it should be 18, but I'm just trying to argue, can we just agree on a floor of 16? Just nobody should be on it until 16. And then nobody feels the pressure to be on it. The third is phone-free schools. If you can text your kids during the school day, I guarantee you they're checking their texts. They're sending texts.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Everybody's texting everybody. They're not listening to the teacher. They're not even talking to each other. Hallways in schools are very quiet these days because all the kids are on their phone all the time. But if you have a phone-free school, you turn in the phone in the morning, they get it back in the afternoon. amazing things happen.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
What the schools always say is they hear laughter in the hallways again. The kids are paying attention to the teachers. They're flirting, talking, joking with each other. So you got to have phone-free schools. And the fourth norm, and this is the hardest, and this is the one that you got, the fourth norm is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Because if we're going to Take them off of screens. If they're not, I mean, not all screens, they can watch some television, but if we're going to, if they're not going to be growing up on screens, we have to give them back a fun childhood. My book isn't about screens. It's about childhood. You got to give back a fun childhood. And even though the phone will take, suck them away.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Cause it seems so interesting when you actually put kids together without phones, they have a lot of fun and they laugh and they invent games. So, but if you do all four, And if you have a community, it's hard to do it by yourself. But if you get a community and a church parish or a school, those are the two best units where you really have people. You have adults who care about kids.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
You have kids who want to play with each other. And so if you do that in a community, boom, you roll it back. And within a few weeks, within a month or two, the kids are going to be happier, having fun. They'll adjust to not being on their phones and everyone's better off.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
um or the minimum age mandate for in australia yes australia is the first country in the world to do it um the tech companies say that they can't do it but of course they can do it they know everything about us they know how old we are so they can figure it out and australia is the first country with the guts to say you know what you've been you've been trashing our children for so long uh we're going to raise the age to 16 and you guys have to enforce it you figure it out doesn't have to be perfect but you got to make an effort right now they're making no effort yeah
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
That's going to be in five or ten years. I believe that within five or ten years, we're going to look back on this and think, what the hell were we doing? Thank God we're not doing that anymore. I just read 40% of two-year-olds in the United States have their own iPad. 40%.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
That means they're growing up 40% because we've all discovered, we all discovered what, you know, what, what you said, Chase, you just, you give them, you give them a device and they're quiet. It's great. It seems to work great. They're happy. You're happy, but you know, you're kind of blocking their brain development.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Well, and the teachers. The teachers have hated the phones. The teachers have desperately wanted to get rid of the phones. But there are always some parents who said, no, I need to call my child whenever, anything.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Yep, exactly.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Well, thank you, gentlemen. I hope your listeners will go to anxiousgeneration.com. We have a lot of resources for parents, for teachers, for legislators. This is a movement. And when you get millions and millions of parents, and especially the moms, I mean, the mothers around the world are just up in arms about this. When you get a movement of parents, I don't think we can be stopped.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Very clever.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Thank you so much. Oh, and please call me John.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Well, thank you. Thank you, Al. You know, everyone who has kids has, has seen this. Something's going on with the kids and the screens and that's what the book's about.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Sure. And actually, it works pretty well if you haven't read the book, because this gives me a chance to just sort of lay it out, the big picture for all the listeners who haven't read the book. So what the book is about is that something changed around 2012. I'm a college professor, and we saw this with the students coming in to campus around 2014, 2015.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
They were just much more depressed and anxious. And a lot of surveys found the same thing. It wasn't just college students. It was all kids who were born 1996 and later. We now know them as Gen Z. They're not millennials. It's a different generation. They have much higher rates of anxiety and depression and self-harm and even suicide. So what happened?
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
And why was there no sign of trouble before 2012? All the way up from the 90s through 2010, there's no sign of a mental health problem. And so what my book is about is about how this period, 2010 to 2015, was the great rewiring of childhood. If you were born in 1995, you're the last of the millennials, you went through puberty with a flip phone.
Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
You didn't have a smartphone when you were in middle school, you had a flip phone. And a flip phone is good for talking to your friends and texting them. You're not talking to strangers, you're not on your phone 10 hours a day. But if you were born in the year 2000, You're Gen Z and you turn 15 in 2015 and you got a smartphone. If you're a girl, you probably had Instagram.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Very high rates of anxiety and depression. They filled up the mental health centers. They would sometimes be very anxious or even get upset if there was a speaker coming to campus that they didn't like. They thought this could be dangerous. And we're like, what do you mean dangerous? Like, what do you mean you need a safe space? So this was a distinct shift that you noticed.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
It was like all of a sudden, bam. That's right. That's right. Because... We thought at the time that the students coming in were millennials. We thought the millennial generation starts in 1981. We'll go maybe to 2000, we thought. But it turns out that if you're born in 1996, you just, on average, of course, there's a huge difference. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. On average, you're more anxious.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And so you come to school and now you see like someone has a very different opinion and you're like, you know, this is dangerous. This is terrible. I don't want to engage with this person. And so that's how I first noticed it. And so this is, you know, just the things you guys are talking about.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
It's like if you block the kids from having these interpersonal skills, you put them into a space where they see more things as threatening, they're not going to thrive in college. In college, you need to be in discover mode. I have a whole chapter on discover mode versus defend mode. Mm-hmm. And it was a very sudden switch. Kids born in 1996 and later were more likely to be in defend mode.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Yeah. So Canada was able to do this because they have a wonderful researcher professor at the University of British Columbia named Mariana Brussoni. And I talk about her work in chapter three of The Anxious Generation. And she's been pushing this for a long time, that kids need risky play. Risk is a feature, not a bug, of childhood.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And as she says, playgrounds should be as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. Whereas in America, in part because we have so many lawyers, everyone's afraid of being sued. And so playground guidelines will say things like, there must not be exposed roots of a tree near the playground because the kids might trip. Which of course teaches them to expect no obstacles.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Everything should be clear and easy and safe. And then you go out into the world and it's full of obstacles. And so that's part of the reason we think why the kids began to freak out. Those who were born in 1995, they weren't prepared for life.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. And this is the dilemma that we're in as parents, because we love our children. We see something bad happening to them. We see kids picking on them or excluding them. We want to swoop in. And it used to be when we were out away from our home, they couldn't swoop in because they weren't there. But now either they're there or we're all connected by text or they're tracking us.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And so a question I would ask is for everybody to think about. Okay, you've got three young kids. What is the ideal number of times that you want each of your children to be excluded socially by the time they reach 18? Is it zero? Do you hope that they're never excluded from anything and suffer the pain of exclusion? Or would you like it to happen, you know, several times a month?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. So the principle of inoculation is really powerful here. We all understand the immune system now, especially since COVID, that if you're exposed to a little bit of something, your body then develops antibodies to it. It learns how to defend against it. And so this is called anti-fragility. There's a couple of words for it, anti-fragility.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
If we think our kids are fragile, then we're going to protect them. We don't want them excluded. It'll hurt. They might traumatize them. But if we realize that they're the opposite of fragile, that they actually need to fall down, they need to be excluded sometimes to feel the pain of exclusion.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
This then causes them first a better understanding of how to be included and excluded and sympathy for the other kids who are excluded because they know what that pain is like. So in all these ways, these negative childhood experiences are essential. Now, to be clear, bullying, especially if it goes on for multiple days, that's the most horrible thing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And there's no evidence that that's beneficial. But conflict is normal. The kids have to learn how to have conflict and cooperation. They go together. We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Well, if you describe it as violence, I'm not going to say that, oh, kids need violence. I would never say that. But we're mammals. We love rough and tumble play. When I was a kid, one of the main, you know, like, what do you want to do? Should we play this? Do you want to wrestle? Sure, let's wrestle. And then we would just, like, go at it. And we'd try to pin each other.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And, you know, so kids are physical. And if you ban, you know, some schools I've heard, they have a no-touch policy. You can't touch another child.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. So you have a son and then- Two daughters. A son and then two daughters.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Okay. So when we look across mammal species, especially across primates, the young males do a lot more rough and tumble play. They wrestle more. Yeah. That's just a, you know, it's a biological difference. It's an effect that prenatal testosterone has on the brain.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And what we've done in our schools is in the 1980s, we freaked out about how American test scores were behind those of some other nations. There was a report, a nation at risk. Oh, we need to get rid of most of, you know, recess and art and summer vacation. Let's, you know, lengthen the school year, give them more math, more science. And this was especially bad for boys.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And this is when boys begin to drop out. Boys don't do well just sitting and listening. They're more physical. They're more subject to ADHD, for one thing. And so schools are becoming increasingly non-receptive or hostile to boys even. And I would say having an absolute ban on any sort of pushing or physical, that would be really bad for boys.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Well, what I discovered once the book came out and even before it came out Was that there is a desperation among mothers in particular that all over the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. Everyone hates it. We didn't ask for it. Wasn't like this in 2010. I mean, of course, there are always arguments over TV.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. So, so much of the attention is on girls. And in the book, I focused especially on the data showing that social media is particularly harmful for girls. And that's actually what got me into the book. Those were the scientific findings that were most solid. That sort of got me studying that. And I thought the story of the book was going to be especially social media is hurting girls.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And I didn't know what the story was for boys when I started the book. I thought, is it going to be video games? Is that going to be the same thing for girls? And what we learned, and this is work I did with Zach Rausch, the lead researcher on the book, we drew on a wonderful book by Richard Reeves. It's a book called Of Boys and Men. Okay.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And he is really leading the charge for a totally non-politicized effort to help boys. Because, of course, everything gets, in this country, everything gets culture war.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Everything. Anyway, the point is, the story that we took from Richard in adding on a lot more about technology is that boys, of course, used to dominate. The world was made for boys and men. But as societies change, as physical strength no longer matters so much, as America shifts to a service economy, that's bad for men, good for women. So that's great that women are rising up.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But as schools and workplaces are becoming less hospitable to men, they're investing less of their effort. And boys are about six months to a year behind girls anyway, especially for emotional development. And so girls are outperforming boys at every level from kindergarten through PhD. Wow. There's more girls who are succeeding, more girls going on at every level. So boys are dropping out.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But at the same time that they were dropping out in the 80s and 90s, The technological world was getting amazing. So when I was a kid in the 70s, the only video game that you could play at home was Pong. Whereas when you, you know, you're younger than me. What video games did you have?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That was an old one, yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. So the videos are getting better and better. Now, at this point, you were growing up, the porn was still on paper. There wasn't porn on your computer. You couldn't find it anywhere. You've just tapped into my childhood, my friend.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But once kids got touchscreen devices, which are much more addictive. You have a stimulus response loop, which is much more addictive than watching a story on a screen. And so family life changed and people couldn't, like, what the hell is going on? And my sense is that mothers felt their kids being pulled away much more than fathers did. Fathers were often like, oh, you know, cool video game.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Okay, right. But let's trace it on now for people younger than you. Suppose you're born in the late 90s. Well, the multiplayer video games only come in after we get high-speed internet. So it's only the late 2000s, 2008, 2009, that you're really beginning to get these incredible multiplayer games where you're in your house with your headset and this avatar on the screen. I mean, they're amazing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And... they go through many product iteration cycles to figure out what can we do? What's the point structure to keep boys on the longest? Because if we keep them on, they don't go to another platform. So, you know, the dose makes the poison. So when you get these incredibly immersive games that are designed to keep you on.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And for boys, if you, you know, after school, if you want to play with your friends, you can't go over to their house. No. You have to go home so that you can be on your headset. So the boys are having fun. They're enjoying the video games. And once you get high-speed internet, you get porn, not just pictures, but video. Anyone can go on Pornhub. There's no identification. Right.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. The way to understand how we got into this insane situation is to trace it out from the 90s on. So when the internet came out, 1994 was when I first saw a web browser. It was miraculous. I mean, it was like God came down to us and said, do you want to know everything instantly? Type it in. You'll get an answer. We're like, are you kidding me? This is amazing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And so the early internet really was amazing. And your generation grew up, you were a kid when the first internet came out. And you played on in all sorts of ways. Sure, some bad stuff happened. But your day wasn't dominated by a few companies that were experts at addicting you. Yeah, they did. So you could wander around. You saw a lot of stuff. You saw some bad stuff.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But it was mostly good stuff.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And the other thing that happened in the 90s was as you get the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spread of democracy and then you get the rise of the Internet, we're all convinced – that the internet is going to be the best thing ever to happen to democracy. You know, what dictator could possibly oppose the people connected in this way?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And you go all the way from, you know, the 90s all the way through the Arab Spring, we still think that. We still think by 2011, 2012, we're still thinking, oh, the internet is amazing. It's great for democracy. And we're still thinking, I think it's good for kids. I mean, it's the future. I mean, the kids need to be on it because, like, that's the technology. Yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So as late as 2012, 2013, we're still all techno optimists. And so, you know, we kind of know that our kids, all you have to do is click a button and you can be talking to strange men. There was this, did you ever see Omegle? It was, there was a site. It was like, their motto was talk to strangers. Oh, wow. Yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And a lot of them were naked men masturbating and trying to find kids to talk to, to masturbate. And so a lot of, you know, 11, 12 year old girls remember these experiences. Yeah. And the fact that we're so careful about letting our kids to a place where maybe some man will molest them, like Boy Scouts or anything else. We're so afraid, you know, or the playground.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
The child molesters are not at the playground. That's too dangerous. They're all on Instagram. They're all on Snapchat. That's where you can use a fake name, find kids, get them to send you a photograph. And then once they send you a photograph, you've got them. You can now extort them. Wow. So terrible things are happening to our kids online. And I think it's finally coming to us.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But mothers really felt it. And so that's what's driven the success of the book is it. It's mothers around the world and all the political changes, all the laws that are being introduced. Oftentimes, it's either a female governor like Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas or it's the governor or prime minister's wife who reads the book and says – and this is what happened in Australia.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
The internet is actually overall a pretty risky place. We let adults do what they want and take their risks. But my God, how the hell are these companies able to get to my kids and your kids without our knowledge or consent? We need to have some age gating on the internet or we can't just let kids wander on it.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
It's going to be a seller's market for the boys that are functional.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But there are almost no girls who are having a porn problem. There are almost no girls who are addicted or watching it every day. Do we know why? Yeah. I mean, you know, the evolutionary speculation is there's a whole bunch of research on differences in mate searching and selection. And, you know, men are more attracted to youth and visual. So there's all kinds of reasons why this would be.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But you find this over and over again. Just the nature of male sexuality and female sexuality, whether you're gay or straight, doesn't really matter. It's male-female is just different about visual stuff.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
In any case, the way to understand what's happening to boys I've come to see really more since writing the book is imagine your boy is out there in the world and these sort of these fish hooks come down from the sky and they've got all kinds of bait on them. So the first hook is video games. And then you're a little older, down comes incredible porn.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And so, again, you know, some boys can just enjoy it with no problem. But again, you find usually between 5% and 15% for each of these get addicted. They have a behavioral addiction. And then they get a little older. They find ways to gamble even before they're 18. And that's all set up to catch boys. You got the crypto investing. You got stock investing. All of it is gamified for boys.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Oh, and you got the vaping and the marijuana pens and all of that. And so imagine a boy whose day is filled mostly with video games, porn, watching TikTok and YouTube videos, especially the very short videos. And for the boys, their feeds often have a lot of violence.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
They often have funny videos of people falling out a window, like 10 stories and dying, or being run over by a car, things like that. And so imagine if that's what your boy does for half the day. His brain, his dopamine system, the reward motivation pathways, respond by dampening down so that they require more stimulation just to be normal.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Which is why if your son is playing a lot of video games and you take him away, if he becomes anxious and irritable and possibly even violent, that's a definite sign of dopamine change, that your boy's brain has been changed. Now, it'll change back. But what happens if boys are doing this from the age of 5 through 18? Those might be permanent. We don't know.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But there's a good reason to think that if you go through puberty with these distortions of your dopamine system, that it could well change the way you are for the rest of your life. And the way you'd see it is that everything off of the screen is more boring. Right. So your boy comes into class. Now, half of the school day or third of the school day is on a screen nowadays, which is horrible.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
The wife of one of the premier of South Australia read the book and she said – she was reading it in bed and she turns to him and says, Peter, you've got to read this book and then you've got to fucking do something about it. Wow. So he did. And that's what started the process in Australia.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And that's a COVID thing. But what we're finding is that kids are having a lot of trouble paying attention to anything that's not on the screen. And it's because their brains have been gamified and the dopamine circuits have been changed.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Just give us your soul. Exactly. Exactly.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So girls really thrive if they have a couple of close friends They tend to get together in small groups and talk. Boys tend to choose larger groups and then they'll break up into teams to do sports or competition. That's what kids do when they can do what they want. And with the girls, what happened was once they all got onto Instagram, now it's not just you and a couple of friends.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Now you're communicating with all these, so many more people. And we thought maybe 10, 15 years ago, well, maybe this is good. They're super connected. But it turns out that if you're having hundreds and hundreds of communications each day with lots of people, then there's no time for you to have those close friendships.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And so for the girls, social media seems to connect them virtually, but at the cost of connecting them in real life. And so the girls got lonely, even though social media is supposed to be so, you know, it's supposed to help you find community. Yeah. But the girls get lonelier once they get on it. With boys, the video games are better than social media in that at least it's synchronous.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That is, you know, my son, we finally let him have Fortnite when COVID started. And I'm very glad we did because that was the only way that the boys were getting together. And I would hear him laughing his head off with his headphones on. So at least for the boys, what they're doing is at least synchronous. And so that's good. And they're laughing, which is good.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But what we're seeing now is that there's really something special about being together in person. A lot of us, we've seen this since COVID. Now we do a Zoom, you know, like what we're doing now. Like I've done a lot of interviews on Zoom. Like this is so much more fun to be sitting across the table from you guys. That's what we talk about.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But I love that you said that. So my brain is going really fast here because I'm making a connection. I wish I had this in the book. In my book, The Righteous Mind, I cover the work of Michael Tomasello on joint attention. And he, Tomasello, did this amazing work with children and chimpanzees.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And he found that even though chimpanzees are really smart, and when you compare a chimpanzee to a two-year-old child that's solving physical tasks like using tools, they're equal. But when you have a social task about like the experimenter gives you a signal, like open, like look at that cup. It's there. The reward is under that cup, not that one. The monkeys have no clue. The apes have no clue.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
They don't take signals. Whereas the kids are communicating even before they can speak. They understand what is being communicated. And he points out, and I think this is really important here. He points out that we have this ability to do joint attention, which is where, like right now, we are all totally aware that we are doing a podcast together. Yes.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And we all kind of know we're dividing the labor and we're taking turns.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
All of that is happening. So Tomasella says, it is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimps carrying a log together. So they could easily escape from their enclosure if they could pick up the log and go.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And they're brilliant as individuals, but they can't do things together. So we humans, we have this magical ability. Mm-hmm. And you know this, if you traveled a lot, sometimes you're in a country where you don't speak the language, but you can still kind of like, you can still kind of communicate because we all understand, oh yeah, I think he probably is trying to find the bathroom or whatever.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So we have this joint attention. And it just occurred to me now as you were talking about Zoom, Zoom, that kills that. Like you don't, I mean, you don't, at least you don't have it as much. And then to bring it back to the kids, you know, my son was laughing his head off, but he wasn't in the room with anyone else. And so I think there's really something missing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
What a prick. And you get points for the number of times... And you played this game.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
You don't have the joint attention and the shared laughter is not as good if you're not in the room.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
I can summarize the whole book by saying that we've overprotected our children in the real world and we've underprotected them online. Another way to say it is the book is a tragedy in two acts. Act one, we lose the play-based childhood. And this really kicks in in the 1990s. So older millennials, people who grew up in the 70s and 80s, there was a huge crime wave at that time, in America at least.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But all kids played outside. You just go outside and play.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. The game should be a sort of a thing that brings you together in person. That's what I felt.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And then it's the 90s, which is actually when crime is dropping and life is getting safer and drunk driving is going down. We freak out in the 90s and we start saying, well, it's too dangerous out there. It's too dangerous. You know, stay home. You have to always be supervised or you'll be abducted. We freaked out about child abduction. So that's one of the tragedies. We pull the kids indoors.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Oh, good. So let's bring in Bob Putnam here because I listened to your conversation. Yeah, you're right. That was so good. I mean, he is absolutely amazing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So for everybody listening, he wrote the famous book Bowling Alone. And so we social scientists, we all love his work. We've been citing him certainly for 25 years. His work is really important here because Putnam describes how up through the mid-'70s, America had a lot of social capital, a lot of trust. So even though there's a lot of crime, We all played outside.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And, you know, we all knew, like, if I wipe out on my bicycle and am badly hurt, my friend could knock on any door and say, can you call his mom? But after the 70s, it begins declining our trust in each other. And so the reason we don't let our kids out in the 90s is not because the world's getting more dangerous. It's actually getting safer. It's because we're losing trust in our neighbors.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
We're losing the sense of community. And once we lose the sense of community, the sense that all of us are at least a little bit responsible for other people's kids, Now it's like, as we just, as we joked about, like, you know, you say, I walked by a playground. Oh, no, you're a man. You can't go near a playground. You're going to molest a child.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So as we all freaked out about that, and it's not that there was nothing to freak out about, but boy, did we overdo it by saying, like, let's just not get involved in anyone else's child. Now it falls all on the mother. Now the responsibility falls especially on the mother. And if a kid is seen playing outside without supervision, all the blame goes to the mother. How dare you?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
The boy was 10. Yeah. And she didn't even send him. The boy was 10 and he decided to walk, you know, a little bit to a store.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Yeah, that's right. So a lot of the fear in America is not just of abduction. Some people are afraid of abduction, which is almost unheard of in this country. But others of us are afraid that a neighbor will call the police on us.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Do you get what I'm saying? But if we don't know each other, we're afraid they'll yell at us. They might be armed. Who knows? Yes.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
We don't let them have play. And free play is crucial for development. And then act two is very, very sudden. It's between 2010 and 2015. In 2010, kids are going through puberty with a flip phone. And a flip phone or basic phone, you can text your friends, you can call your friends. And there was a game called Snake, I think. Yeah, I love Snake. Okay, but that's about it.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. There's a really interesting observation about America from Alexis de Tocqueville, the French sociologist or aristocrat who traveled in America in the 1830s. And he wrote Democracy in America, which many American kids used to read in middle school. And de Tocqueville observes that in America, it's the most amazing thing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
When a town, when they need to build a bridge over the stream, they need to build a school or a hospital, the townspeople get together and somebody figures is going to lead it and they figure how to raise the money and then they do it. Whereas in France, we wait for the king to do it. And in Britain, you know, they wait for the nobles to do it. And this is an amazing thing about America.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And this is really the whole Ben Franklin thing. Like, let's start institutions. There's a problem. Let's solve it. And this is part of what made America amazing and special and different is that we had such a vast country and such a weak central government that you couldn't really count on government. So that was part of the American character.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But now we're blocking children from developing that. We're blocking children from having the ability to say, hey, we've got a problem. Let's figure out how to solve it. Let's just call in the authorities. So once again, we're preparing our kids for authoritarianism, not for democracy.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So for girls, the central harm, the most important harm comes through social media. And so one way to think about this is if you're a company and you want to trap girls, what you would do is you would say, hey, here's social information. Do you want to see what so-and-so said about so-and-so? Do you want to see who's friends with who, who's dating who? So that's much more appealing to girls.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. Girls and women have a more developed sense of social relationships. They have a map in their head. It's a common joke, whereas a lot of men have to say, honey, how do I know that person? They're my friend. So girls and women, they're more interested in it. They're more socially savvy. And so they all rush onto Instagram, especially around 2012, and now they're in it.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Okay, but once they're in it, and this is pushing out real-world relationships, it's pushing out gossiping with two friends in person, what are they looking at? They're looking at photos of each other who are often enhanced or at least carefully selected to look at their best. So on average, the average woman is below average, at least compared to what she sees.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
You weren't talking to groups of 50 strangers. You weren't talking to strange men who wanted sex from you. I mean, it was like, you know, it was a communication device. So if you're born in 1995, that's the last year of the millennials, suppose you're a girl born in 1995. In 2010, you're 15, you're through early puberty, but you did it on a flip phone without Instagram.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And so that's the healthy stuff, just seeing your friends. Okay, then there's all the influencers. Kids need role models. I have a whole chapter in the book on puberty. Part of what's happening at puberty is you're making the transition from child to adult. And so you're looking desperately for role models. I'm a girl. How do I become a woman? Oh, I should, you know, I dress this way.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
I wear makeup. And if girls are exposed to inappropriate influencers, this is why we now have 9- and 10-year-old girls going to Sephora buying euthanizing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So it's completely insane. So just exposing girls to all these models that show them what matters about you is your looks. What matters about you is your skin, your hair, your breasts. That's what matters. And that's what you have to be conscious of. This is a terrible thing to do to girls during the most difficult period of their lives. But it gets darker.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So suppose a girl wants to be thin because there's so much pressure to be thin. So she types in something about dieting on Instagram or TikTok. And many reporters and attorneys general and law enforcement agents have done this. You create an account. You say you're a 13-year-old girl. You say, give me stuff on dieting. And before you know it, you're getting eating disorder stuff.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
You know, like no food tastes as good as being thin.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
The one is, what is it? Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. Thank you. That's what I was trying to remember. Yeah. So this is a really sick thing to do to girls. And at the same time, the screen-based life is causing them to be more obese. So we have a whole generation that I think the average is 12 minutes of vigorous exercise a day and 8 to 10 hours of screen time a day, not including school.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
The phone-based childhood is making them heavier while at the same time telling the girls you have to be thinner, which is almost impossible to do. The other thing that is important about girls is that they're more emotionally connected. They're more emotionally savvy. They pick up more when someone is feeling something but doesn't express it. Whereas boys are a little more clueless.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So the point is, boys are on together. They're not really picking up each other's emotions. They're just laughing about, you know, sports or war or sex or funny videos. Right. When girls get on, they're just much more sensitive to the emotions being expressed, and they take on each other's emotions more. And I think this can explain a mystery in the data.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
When we graph out all of these mental illness stats, the boys are doing worse too, no question about it. But the boys' curves are gradual, whereas the girls, it's stable from the 90s on most things through 2011. And then 2012 is like a hockey stick, and it goes up very sharply. And I think it's because...
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Before then, the girls were connecting on their flip phones and then getting together in person. That's perfectly healthy. When you get a sudden movement of everyone onto social media and now you've got all this social comparison and all this people expressing anxiety. And if you're expressing anxiety, I'm going to be more anxious.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So I think that's why we see such a sudden change for the girls is the contagion of emotions.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But suppose you were born in the year 2000, so now you turn 15 in 2015. which means that your first phone was probably a smartphone with a front-facing camera, because that comes out 2010, with Instagram, because that becomes popular in 2012, with high-speed internet.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Thank you for pulling me back from the doom and gloom because I can go on forever.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Okay, so let's hope that nobody tuned out before this point of the conversation. So here's what I can say with some confidence. The brain is still pretty plastic until the early 20s. In puberty, so the brain is changing very rapidly in the first couple years, and it's growing very rapidly. But then it reaches full size, almost full size, by about age six. And after that, the game is not growth.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
The game is like which neurons are going to wire up to which, which neurons are going to disappear. And so they're tuning up with cultural input. And it especially speeds up in early puberty. I want everybody to really focus on early puberty. Try to protect your kids during that period. But suppose your kid is 15, she or he has already been on the video games, the social media.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
One possibility is that the changes could be long-lasting. It is possible that if you went through puberty this way, it could change things in ways that are lasting. We don't know. But here's what I can say for sure. When kids take steps to regain control of their attention, they get miraculous results. And I know this because I teach a class at New York University.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
I'm a professor in the business school there. And I teach one of my classes called Flourishing, and it's 35 undergraduates. They're mostly sophomores, about 19 years old. They all spend too much time on their phones. And the project is you have to, over the course of the semester, you have to change yourself in a way that will improve your happiness and flourishing by the end of the semester.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So a lot of them work on their phone habits. And I say, if you're spending three hours a day or more on social media, you have to work on this one because there's no point doing anything else. And the ones who are doing a lot of social media and some are like five or six hours just on TikTok, when they move it off their phone and onto their computer, they get a lot of relief. It goes way down.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And then if they take it off the computer and just stop, especially for TikTok, they tell these miraculous stories like... I can do my homework now. It's not just that I have enough time, it's that I can actually focus on it, and I have more time with my friends, and we're doing fun things, and I'm sleeping better.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And so what I can say for sure to parents whose kids are late teens is it's not too late, but they have to regain control of their attention. They have to largely get off of social media. I'm not going to say that boys shouldn't play video games at all, but just keep an eye on their dopamine circuits.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So you went through early puberty constantly on your phone, taking photographs of yourself, people talking about you, communicating with strangers. The phone moves to the center of your life. So into a screen-based or phone-based childhood that I believe, and I argue in the book, is just not conducive to human development.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Anything they're doing every day for an hour or two, there's a risk that it's changing them in ways that make everything else more boring. So do not give up hope. It's hard to do it yourself. So to say to your 17-year-old daughter, you need to get off social media, even though all your friends are still on it. That's a social death sentence.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
It's going to be very hard to persuade your girl to do that. So the trick is do it in a group. And that's why the class is so successful because they're all supporting each other. They're all doing it. And then sometimes they go out together.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. Especially when your kids are younger, you know, we all know the parents of our kids' friends because we arrange pickups and birthday parties and all that. So if you get a group of friends, the parents all agree to do this. We're going to follow the four norms that I lay out in the book. Then it's actually much easier and it's a lot more fun.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So the four norms to roll back the phone-based childhood are pretty simple. They are, first, no smartphone before high school or age 14. You want to communicate with your kid? Give them a flip phone. Give them a basic phone. Give them a gab phone, a pinwheel phone. There's all kinds of options that don't have a browser, don't have social media. And I think the way to think about it is this.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Across the Western world, we all have our previous iPhone in a drawer someplace, and we all give that to our two-year-old. I just saw an incredible study. It found that 40% of American two-year-olds have their own iPad. And so we're just giving this advanced technology to two-year-olds. Mm-hmm. Don't do that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Okay. But we do it, I think, a large part of it is because we all discovered just give them the iPad and they're quiet. It's a digital pacifier. It's a digital pacifier. It's like giving them a little bit of opium.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So it's very effective, but I think it's also very damaging. So my point is, don't start with that stuff. I mean, they're going to have that eventually. You know, give them, you know, if they're in third, fourth grade, you want to send them out into the world, give them a phone watch, not an Apple watch that has too much stuff on it, but just a phone watch.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
I gave my daughter, I think it was called the Gizmo gadget. She could call three phone numbers. That was it. And that was great for sending her out in the world. So start real simple. Now, in high school, then many will want to wait later, but I'm just trying to propose a norm. What if there's a norm that we all adopt as a minimum? That would have so much benefit for all of us.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So, again, the first norm, no smartphone for high school. Second norm, no social media until 16. And here's where what we really need is a law implementing a minimum age, and Australia has done that for us. It'll take effect November, and let's hope it works smoothly, and then a lot of countries will follow.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But anyway, try to keep your kids off from opening a social media account, especially TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat, until they're 16. The third norm is phone-free schools. If you can text your child during the day, during class... That's a problem.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That means that all the kids are texting each other, and everyone has to check, because nobody wants to be the one kid at lunch who didn't know about the thing that happened in the third period. So...
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So schools must take the phone in the morning, put it in a locker or a locked pouch, a yonder pouch, or just a manila envelope in the front of homeroom or by the teacher's desk, but take the phones away in the morning and phone watches and AirPods, everything, give it back when they leave, and that way they pay attention to the teacher and the other kids. That's what we want.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
The fourth norm is the hardest, and we've already been talking about it. The fourth norm is far more free play, independence, and responsibility in the real world. Because the point here isn't just, you know, let's take away the screens. The point is, let's give them back an amazing childhood. They need fun. They need interaction.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
They need to wrestle, put their arms around each other, laugh together, eat together. So we've got to give them back more time together. And that's hard because we don't trust our neighbors anymore. It's hard to just say, go out and play.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Okay, I get what you mean. Your grandmother told you. You travel around the world. Sometimes you don't see girls, but you always see boys playing in the street. Yes. The third space is the street.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So we would close the street with bricks. You take responsibility.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So if you're listening to this, I'm not talking about the highway. This was just an informal thing you did.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
You literally just have to claim it back collectively. I think that's really good because what you're saying is we have to be much more deliberate about this. My parents grew up in New York City. It was very similar. They'd play stickball in the street. If a car's coming, you step back. Exactly. So we can't just say to our kids, you know, you're nine years old. Get out of here.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Don't come back till the streetlights come on. Don't come back till dinner. In some parts of America, you can do that. There are rural parts or places where people trust their neighbors. But especially for those of us in cities, we're going to have to be a lot more deliberate.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And what you're saying is an example of a community or a couple of leaders taking a step to make something happen right here in Chelsea. So that's great. I want to bring in here an organization that I co-founded called Let Grow. If you have young kids, go to letgrow.org. It's run by a wonderful woman named Lenore Skenazy who wrote a book called Free Range Kids.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
It's all about how do we help Americans actually let go and let their kids grow with these sorts of experiences.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And so we have two really simple programs. The simplest of all is called Play Club. And what it is is a school, it's based around schools and school playgrounds. In a lot of places, parents don't trust anything, but they do trust the school playground. That's the one place that they will let their kids hang out after school. And so it's so simple.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
A school just says, okay, one after school activity that you can choose is play club. And so let's say your eldest son You sign him up for Fridays, let's say. So he's part of play club on Friday, along with 10 or 20 other kids who are always there on Friday. And there's an adult nearby. There is an adult around if someone gets hurt, but there's nobody blowing a whistle. There's nobody supervising.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
There's nobody directing. And so you were talking about your one year old being overscheduled.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Okay. But when she starts school, especially say kindergarten, first grade, they love running around on the playground. So play club is so simple. It doesn't cost anything. Okay, you need to have like one staff person stay after. But the results are so amazing. Teachers often volunteer to do it because it's so wonderful to watch. So just using the local school playground.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Now, some schools in New York City, I talked with a principal up in the Bronx yesterday. He said, there is no outdoor space.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Yeah, so the main criticism I get is that this is a moral panic, just like we freaked out about television issues. And comic books and radio and everything else. And there is some truth to that, that the older generation always thinks the younger generation is being harmed by whatever they're doing. And sometimes that's wrong, like with comic books.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But, so we have to be intentional and clever. We've got to find spaces for our kids to play without adults directing them. And it's going to be tricky, but we can do it. And there's a, you know, this is an enormous need. I teach in a business school and I've really come to see, You know, entrepreneurs are not saying, how can I get rich, rich, rich?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
They're saying, where's something that needs doing? Where's there a market for something? Where's there a desire? One of the biggest desires in the world is parents who want to give their kids a better childhood, but they don't know where to do it. There's no third space. So in Britain, there's a company, I think it's called The Den.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And they have these, I suppose it's for, I don't know if it's for profit or nonprofit. I should look that up. But it's a place that routines can hang out. And there are games and there's food and there are adults around.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So I think we have to really double down on that. Community is not going to happen naturally the way it used to. And we have to be more deliberate.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Which ideas made you vibrate?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Okay. So this is our second program at Let Grow. Again, it's so simple. It's called the Let Grow Experience. Okay. Here's all it is. It's made for schools, but you can do it by yourself at home. So imagine you've got an elementary school, and imagine that you say all the third graders are going to do the Let Grow experience. You give them a piece of paper with instructions. They take it home.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
It says work with your parents to pick something that you think you can do by yourself that you've never done before. You're going to do it with your parents' permission, but without your parents. Let me give them some examples. Like maybe you think that you have a dog and you've never walked it by yourself. You know, you're eight years old. You've never been like around the block with the dog.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And sometimes it's right, like with smoking or, you know, drug use where we think, you know, kids shouldn't be doing this. So the question is, am I warning people? Am I raising an alarm that doesn't need to be raised and I'm just frightening people and there's really no problem? Or am I calling attention to what I think is the biggest threat to children's mental health in modern history?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But mama, I think I can do that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Look, if it takes that to let you do it, do it. Start that way. Or make breakfast for the family. Because one of the things that happened around 2011 is teenagers began much more likely to agree with the statement, my life feels useless. Our kids, they feel useless. All they do is consume content. They don't do anything. And so the let grow experience is do something new, useful.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And two amazing things happen. The first is, let's say you send your kid out, there's a store three blocks away, your eight or nine year old can go get a quart of milk and come back. The first thing is they are jumping up and down when they return. They are so excited. They did something. And the key is that it's a little scary at first, because they've never done it before.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But that's how we get over our fears. You get over your fears by experiencing a stimulus. Nothing bad happens. And then the next time, you have less fear. So the kids are changed, and the kids have a sense of competence and capability. But the unexpected effect, or maybe actually this was planned by Lenore and others who invented it, is the parents' fear goes down.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Because the first time we had, my wife and I, the first time we let our son walk to school. I tell this story in the book. We only let our son walk to school in fourth grade when he was nine because we were friends with Lenore Skenazy. No kids were walking to school at nine, even at 10, even fifth grade. In New York City, it starts more at sixth grade. But we were a little early on it.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But the first time we did, it was terrifying. And, you know, we tracked him. We gave him my old iPhone because we didn't know any better. And we tracked him. And we were like, oh, my God, is he going to make it? And we're watching it. Wait, he must – he's at 7th Avenue. But that's a really complicated intersection.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Is he going to make it? We were really nervous.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
You know, and even though I know all this stuff, but this – I'm a parent. Like, this is what we feel. Yeah. And so then the second day, we were just a little nervous. And the third day, not at all. And that was it. We never tracked them again. So the let grow experience. So if you do it in a school, imagine all the third graders in town are doing this.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So beginning of September, you see a whole bunch of eight-year-olds walking to the store. And maybe they're together and laughing or maybe they're alone. And once you see a lot of it, you realize like, oh, okay, I guess eight-year-olds walk to stores now. Nobody's seen that since 1992. But if you do it as a community, suddenly you change the norms in the community.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. We have to be more deliberate, and so that's a good point. I was emphasizing, like, you can do it yourself as one family. It's better if you do it with a few families. It's best if you do it by the whole school. However you do it, I had thought before, and I sometimes say, you might even go talk to the chief of police and say, what do you think about this? We want to do this.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Do you think this is okay? Because if you warn the police ahead of time, and they're probably going to be supportive— If you talk to them ahead of time, then there's not much risk. You know, if some nosy neighbor calls the police, they're going to say, it's okay, we know about this. But I haven't thought of talking to the shopkeepers. So that's a great idea.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
If there's a store that your kid can walk to, talk to them and say, is it okay if I send my kid in here? Oh, they're going to love it.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So that's the question. Am I right or am I wrong? And some people say, oh, you know, correlation doesn't equal causation. The fact that mental illness rates all go up around 2012, 2013, it could be because of school shootings, they say. Because we had this horrible school shooting, 2012, the Newtown Massacre. And after that, our kids had these lockdown drills.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
I could just say just first, if you don't have kids, there's a whole chapter in the book on spiritual degradation. Yeah. All of us are feeling it. It's affecting us all. So the book, I hope, does speak to all ages. So there is a movement brewing around the world. I love it. Parents are sick and tired of this. They are revolting. Gen Z is sick and tired of it. They see what's happening.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
They are revolting. So even though this problem seemed insurmountable a year ago, what we're finding is the will to solve it is so widespread that people are coordinating. People are acting together. So if we act together, I think we can beat this. I think we can restore a fun, exciting, play-based childhood in time for your kids.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Okay, so 2012, that does fit the timing. But then why did girls in Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, across Europe, why did they start cutting themselves in 2012, 2013? Why did they start checking into psychiatric emergency wards?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And so the fact that it happens all over the developed world, we don't have good data from the developing world, but all over the developed world, these rates go up and they were pretty stable for the years before, right? I don't know of another explanation for that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
It's crazy. They're not playing with each other. Exactly. The parents are playing with the kids. Exactly.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
I'll tell you the difference. Federal prisoners, they're guaranteed two hours a day of outdoor time.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And the thing is actually wrestle and bite each other.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. And those parents were kids. All of those parents had free range childhoods. All of them got to play outside. And the most exciting, I always do this with older audiences. Think of the most exciting things in childhood. Call them to your mind. Remember what it was like to be a kid. Were your parents there? Were you watching a screen?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
No, it's outdoors, running around with friends, hanging out. And that's exactly what we've sucked out of childhood and replaced it with mindless entertainment, 15-second videos.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Well, start with the big picture, which is what is childhood for? And what is play for? And because we're mammals, mammals have this... really interesting evolution of having much more investment in the child. I mean, our women literally make food off of the skin of their chest and feed it to, you know? Oh, I know. So it's a huge sacrifice. It's a huge gift to the kids.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
And so mammals have this long childhood. And the reason what it does is it makes possible having a large brain. And especially really social mammals like chimpanzees and humans. How do you wire up that brain? And that's why we have this very long childhood. And the way you wire up a brain is by exploring, trying things, and failing. Explore, try, fail, over and over and over again.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So when a kid tries to build a block tower, it falls over, they do it again. So play builds brains. It's all the things you just said. Once they can master their, you know, building block towers and running and that stuff, then it becomes social. And it's exactly that. It's basically, these are the skills of democracy. In a democracy, the whole idea is we are self-governing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
We make the rules ourselves. We enforce them ourselves. That was the amazing innovation of the American experiment, it's called. And how do you learn to be self-governing? By being self-governing as a child.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
So when the kids are on the playground, it's the things you said. They have to choose what to do. Like, what game should we play? Well, some of us want to play, well, let's work it out. Okay, we'll do yours today. We'll do that one tomorrow. You have to make the rules and you have to enforce the rules. Wait, that was out of bounds. No, it wasn't. And you adjudicate it.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But what we've been training our kids to do since the 90s, since we got them hyper-supervised all the time, is we're training them to report each other to the adult. So if there's a conflict, he hit me. Yeah. And that's training for authoritarianism. There's always an authority who will enforce things. We don't have to work it out ourselves. Damn.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
That's right. There are two parenting styles that have been discovered. They used to be class differentiated, but now they're not so much. And this is unequal childhoods. I've forgotten the name of the sociologist who did this. But she found in the 90s that sort of, you know, college-educated cultures, they did what she called concerted cultivation parenting. Concerted? Concerted cultivation.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
Yeah, like you're a little plant and I'm going to do all these things. I'm going to give you these experiences. I'm going to, you know, make you grow. Mm-hmm. Whereas working class families had what she called natural growth parenting, which is, you know, the kids are running around, they get into some trouble, they get out of trouble. And so there used to be that class difference.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
But what has been found in more recent research is that now even middle class and working class, we're all doing the concerted cultivation. And it's across racial groups as well.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt [VIDEO]
There's not any big race difference that I've found. That's right. So we're basically denying children the main training they need in childhood. And that's actually how I first got into this was noticing that the students who arrived on campus in 2014, 2015 were different than anything we'd ever seen.