The Anxious Generation with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

Jonathan, a big fan of your work. Going back to all your TED talks. I'd like to start there if I can. Your work on morality. I find it endlessly fascinating. One of the things that I find so interesting, especially in these modern times, is. the conflict of morality In other words, two sides believe that they are on the side of the moral right, yeah, um, and you know, and that seems to be the place where we are these days, where it's not like, hm, you have a point of interesting view that I don't agree, but rather I'm right and you're wrong and both sides believe they are fighting for the moral good of the nation.

You know, we used to read the news and then call our friends and vent our anger or feel our emotions. and cry or whatever with our friends and then we could have a rational conversation about it later and now we read the news and we log on to the

social

media of our choice and we vent our anger or we feel our emotions and then we respond to the responses we respond to reactions that's right, so it's very helpful to always ask what game you're playing and what game my partner is playing what game the other person is playing yeah, yeah, you know, in the old days you know when Although I'm older than you, but you know, when we read newspapers and we didn't have

social

media, you could say I'm old enough to remember newspapers.

I'm sorry, but that's very generous of you, thank you. You look, you look much younger than I don't have gray hair, so I'm going to tell you like I guess you're from the

generation

, you're from

generation

X, you're not a millennial, but I'm from generation um, um, but you know so what? What game are you playing? You might have gotten really angry about it and you really want to get it off your chest, so you're playing the game I'm expressing my feelings and there's a place for that, yeah, um, or maybe you know, maybe your friend. doesn't agree with you and then you're playing the game of oh I want to convince him um or maybe it's just the game of I'm right I need to prove myself right so there's a lot of different games and that's only if it's you two now, Suppose instead of a private phone call they said: "let's meet at the Roman Colosseum in the center of the Colosseum and fill the stands with people who paid to come in to see blood, that's what they're there for." They want to see fights and now let's talk about gun control or abortion or whatever you read in the newspaper, let's talk about that, what game would we be playing?

We are completely playing the game of attacking each other to attract the audience. Now, that's not what always happens on Twitter. I mean, Twitter interactions can often be pleasant, but the incentives on social media are not to play the game of finding the truth, they are not to play people, or even to persuade the other. The persona game is really played before an audience and this is one of the reasons why I am so alarmed about the future of the United States, because our country was already polarizing before social media and cable television had a lot to do with this.

I was already worried about polarization. My first keynote talk in 2008 was about left and right, why they can't understand each other. Moral foundations. I was already worried about polarization in 2008 when social media wasn't terribly polarized and then in 2009 you get the Like button, the Twitter button and the Share button, now you have algorithms that become much more common because now you have all this information Coming from the Like and Share buttons, the News Feed appeared a couple of years earlier, so social media really reconfigured itself. between 2009 and 2012 to be much better at throwing gasoline on every possible spark, so yeah, that's where we're playing that game now, the frustration is and this goes to let you know some of the work that I've done and a lot. from the work that you've done where we talk about the younger generations and in the and the insidiousness of social media and cell phones when it comes to feelings of self-esteem and sociability, you know, but the There's no Going back, the Geniuses came out of the bottle and you know what we're talking about now, you know the concept of dopamine and dopamine hits and the addictive quality like this now this is now known like this is like this It's not news anymore, but we all know it, we all know that We are divided, we all know we react to social media the way we do, we all know about virtue signaling on both sides of the political equation, we know these things and yet for some reason we still can't control ourselves we ourselves still can't find our way out of this you know, Jonathan H, how to fix America, okay, come on, I can do half of it, um, let's divide the problem into the children, democracy, okay, the children. which is the subject of my book The generation

anxious

that we can actually solve that in the next year or two U and I will start there Democracy, my goodness, which is a much more difficult problem for many reasons I think I hope we get there, we will get in in um, but what you just laid out is how each of us might want to change individually, but we still can't do it now, sometimes that's because of addiction and like you said, I mean, you know, these things.

They have to do with small doses of dopamine and that is what makes us want more, and smokers, when they want to quit, have trouble quitting, and part of that is what happens to adults, but most importantly , you know, I teach it. courses here at NYU and I have MBA graduate students and I have undergraduate students and we look at what life on social media is doing to them, to their productivity, to their focus, to their happiness, uh and uh, you know. , some of them try to quit smoking. but and I say, well, why don't they leave it? and the answer is always the same because everyone else is in it.

I can't quit because everyone else is in this and would miss out too much. And sometimes there are professional elements for MBA students, but for college students everything is social, so the way to understand what happened to us is that these technology companies have gotten us into what social scientists call a problem. of collective action, where we face a problem. We don't like the way things are. We could change it individually, but each of us who looks at the change says: Wow, if I do that, I'll actually be worse off. That's why most of us, those we know, our children come to us in sixth grade.

Usually the grade is fifth or sixth grade and it says, "You know, Dad." I need a smartphone. Everyone has a smartphone. I am the only one and it is very painful to hear that your child is being excluded. Well, the only reason other parents gave their children. a smartphone so early is because they also said that everyone has a smartphone and therefore each of us might want to delay smartphones and social media, but if our child is the only one who stays well, then our child will be worse situation, but if we all do it together or if even a quarter of us do it together, then our children cannot say that they are the only ones, so if we can do this with the parents of our friends children, then we give them a normal child, we say, instead of spending the entire afternoon on their phone, how about they get together and go out somewhere unsupervised, ride a bike, go buy ice cream, do something together, without adult supervision, they would have a much better childhood, they would turn out mentally healthy?

I agree that the challenge is something like education reform: the more I learn about education reform, the more I learn that it's not the school districts or the teachers, but largely the parents, which is what everyone wants, um uh, an educational reform. I just don't want you to experiment with my son you know please experiment at a different school and find out what happens um and and and I've heard the same thing when it comes to phones I mean some schools have tried to ban phones and it's the parents yeah , who make a fuss, you know, I have to be able to text my son at any time.

What happens if there is an emergency? We'll call the office. They know where your son is. They will take him out of class and tell him. your grandmother died, you know they know where your kids are at all times, but for some reason it's the parents and the anxiety they have and I've even read research that says like in the car, you know kids who are talking on the phone. When driving, it's largely the parents texting them and the parents will get angry with oh no, oh no, then the intention, the intensity of I have to respond immediately, even when I'm driving, the pressures don't come from Actually from my point of view, there is a lot of peer pressure from the children, obviously, but but, but, enormous pressure from the parents, so yes, I hear you, but how many of the parents will collectively say that we are agree to not give to our children when they have the anxiety of not being able to receive? hug your kids at all times, okay, so this is the biggest thing that a lot of people don't seem to understand is that there are other types of phones besides smartphones, yeah, yeah, so I totally get it, look, ya You know, half.

What I'm saying isn't about the phones, half of it is that we have to let kids out on their own at about age eight, there are circumstances where maybe it's later, but you know, in general, all people We were all older. You came out when you were seven or so, that's when you went out and played with other kids, yeah, that's incredibly healthy, you get into trouble, you get into arguments, but you resolve them, um, so that has to happen and it does. I understand. Look, I live in New York City. I said I started letting my kids walk to school in fourth grade when very few anyone else did.

I wasn't going to let my kids walk around New York City without being able to track, find, and contact them, but I didn't think about giving my kid a flip phone. I just said, well, he needs a phone, so I gave him my old iPhone, yeah, but what I'm advocating is that we solve this collective action problem by saying no. smartphones until high school you can give your child a flip phone you can communicate with your child now you are right that even with a flip phone there is too much, there is too much contact, that is definitely true, so we still have to work on the Standards , but at least with a foldable phone, what is a foldable phone for?

The only thing that works is making phone calls and receiving text messages. It doesn't even work for texting because you have to press the seven key three times to form any letter, so if we gave our kids the flip phone. phones, they wouldn't be on it all the time, like they were pouring out their emotions, they would say like you know, see you at three and then they would be more likely to use it to meet and communicate with a person, not to broadcast. to social networks, yes, that is something important technologically in terms of schools, you are absolutely right when I talk about principles, everyone hates phones, it is making their lives miserable, all teachers hate phones, it is making them miserable. miserable life, students don't pay attention in class, they literally watch porn and YouTube and gamble.

I mean, it's crazy that we let kids have the greatest distraction device ever invented. They can keep it in their pocket. It's crazy. And I tell the principles why. Don't just use phone lockers or Yonder bags? It's always the same, which is just what you said. Some parents will be scared because they need to communicate with their children. Yes, that's true. Some parents will freak out, but you know what almost? Most parents are now so fed up with what phones are doing to their children, yes most parents would support a school without phones as long as they know that everyone else supports it, everyone else is doing it and I can communicate with my child, in case of an emergency, some will still be scared, but the vast majority want to do something, so I think this again is a collective action problem, if we start this together, it will overwhelm the principles and they will have What to say, you know what?

A lot more parents want their kids to pay attention in class than the seven who are always ruining my life by yelling at me, yeah, yeah, okay, let's go to democracy, wait, before you do that, do you have kids? No, I have a niece and a nephew, okay, how old are they? He just my nephew just turned 13 and my niece is 14 and they both have smartphones. I guess so. Where are they growing? In Los Angeles. and you know if they're on Instagram they're not okay what's up with Tik Tok they're uh my NE my niece is my niece isn't my nephew my nephew uh his passing is YouTube and uh uh teenager on YouTube I mean him I'm gonna get up and go take a drink and I'll go into the kitchen and he'll be on his phone watching YouTube.

Like, I thought you were just having a drink, you know, yeah, which is crazy, my niece, my niece, is what What I find fascinating about my niece isand I really like this, yes, she talks on the phone all the time with her friends, but she's on FaceTime like they actually are. I find that super FaceTime to be fine, I think. that's super healthy, yeah, yeah, that's true, yeah, so what the research shows is that boys and girls spend about the same amount of time on their phones, about 5 hours a day just on social media. uh now that includes now the trick is that it includes Tik Tok and YouTube because kids watch huge amounts of videos.

What really started in the early 2010s is that when everyone got phones, everyone spent all day on the phone. but the girls chose social media, especially the visual platforms, they opted for Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr um and the boys opted for video games and YouTube, which they also tend to be more addicted to um and that's why the girls got instantly depressed. The depression epidemic started in 2012. 2013. As soon as you know, in 2010, very few children had a smartphone. It was just arriving. You know, the App Store had just been launched recently, so in 2010 the iPhone is not a big part. of teenage life for 2015 is the center of teenage life, so what I'm arguing in the

anxious

generation is that between 2010 and 2015 there was the great rewiring of childhood where children were no longer looking at each other or They spent time together. others because they had this amazing distraction device, this and this phone, which was their portal to a lot of companies that wanted to get their attention, so basically it's like you know a lot of parents wouldn't want their sons, their daughters to have an open opportunity. added window to the street where anyone could reach in and you know, see them and take them, but that's what we did in the early 2010s, we said here, have a phone, go on Instagram, talk to strangers, you know, they'll try . to propose to you, they will try to sell you things, but you know what you are going to do, it's the digital age, that's where we are, but that's what it is, but parents are struggling too, I think I mean all parents, I think most.

Parents mean well, most parents, absolutely, the vast majority of parents want the best for their children, it's okay to be tempted by the magic of the telephone, you know, because it's a great babysitter, you know, to give them to the kids a div I went out to lunch and there was a whole table of parents and then there was a whole table of kids and all the parents were chatting and all the kids were on their own device, yeah, that's right, and it was tragic, like I had friends who have two, two younger children and the children don't have phones, but everyone and I went out to dinner with them and their family.

They bring paper and colored pencils, so the kids like it as soon as you arrive. at the dinner table the kids just start drawing, that's cool and that seems like it to me, so you still allow the kids to get distracted to do something else, except it's analog and I like what happened to the stock market of mom full of games. and toys and you know, pens and pencils and paper, yes, no, that's exactly right, a part of you knows how I am, how I've been piecing together the story of how we got here, yes, how come it's all here now a generation? sucked into this terrible way of growing up, how did this happen?

And what I realized is that you have to go back to the year, let's say 2011 2012, which is when the big transitions happen and you know, for those you know, I mean, I'm I just turned 60, boy, do I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1990s, the beginning of the Internet? I mean, the '90s were incredible and they were very hopeful and you know that democracy is going to rule and the Internet is going to work. so you know, be the best friend of democracy and it's going to defeat the tyrants um and then the millennial generation that grew up with the beginnings of the Internet um mastered it and they were able to use it in all kinds of ways uh we will Speak, I think You and I might disagree about Millennials versus Generation Z or maybe we know it, but Millennials' mental health actually wasn't much worse, it was actually a little better than Generation worse mental health. health of any generation that may be related to lead poisoning.

That's another topic we can go back to, but Millennials, their mental health didn't take a nosedive, so we thought, well, you know, the Internet is amazing, we all love it. um, these kids are digital natives, they're going to go this is the way of the future um and uh, the Internet is incredible for democracy, so is social media and look at the Arab Spring, look at Occupy Wall Street, like this, like this, in 2011, 2012, when you're at a parent, let's say, let's say you're a 35-year-old parent and you're having dinner and you know you're thinking, Should I give my kid an iPhone?

I mean, iPhones are amazing. Internet is amazing. The kids are going to master it anyway. You know what we think. It was cool, yeah, we thought maybe we were even helping them, like letting them have a head start, you know, they're going to live with this stuff, why not let them play with it at three years old? I got my first iPhone when my son was two and he realized it's amazing. He got the tap and swipe technology and the fact that I didn't sell everything and buy Apple stock is one of my biggest regrets. I mean, what a product, uh, this was in 2008, so, so.

You have to go back to that time and realize that we didn't know what we were doing, we thought this wasn't going to harm the children and it was actually only in 2016. I would say it was after Trump's election which was at most "A lot of people, especially in the blue zones of the country, really started turning on the Internet and social media and saw that this was causing all kinds of problems and then we discovered that an online life is actually very bad for children. It's not really I know that in 2011, how would you define the social differences between the millennial generation and generation Z?

What are the big markers that make them so different? Yeah, so the big marker, the biggest marker of all, is that. Millennials grew up with flip phones and Gen Z grew up with iPhones and the reason this is so important is that for Millennials, we had already ruined childhood by the time Millennials came along for many reasons that you've talked about. about the end, you know, the mimes, everyone gets a medal, so that was already happening and it started in the 80s, so you're right in pointing out that this changed the Millennials and it wasn't their fault, you know, it's Nada This is the kids' fault, obviously, it's structures and parents and stuff, but um, Millennials grew up not hardening, uh, we started cracking down on going out, so older Millennials, if you were born in 1981 , 882, you already know. you probably still played outside um but if you were born in 1990 9192 you probably didn't you probably weren't allowed outside without an adult watching you um that's actually in the '90s when we really stopped letting kids out and of course It was right when the crime wave took you down and I grew up during a huge crime wave in the United States, but it mysteriously ends in the '90s again.

I think that's lead poisoning. We'll come back to that, so Millennials don't really have as much freedom in childhood, they have a lot of overprotection, but they still interact a lot with each other directly one on one or in small groups. They have foldable phones, but again not with a foldable phone. You're going to like pour your heart out on a flip phone texting, you use it to talk to a person or text a person, it wasn't just about group calls, so that's Millennials and their mental health. It is, as I said, a little better than the genx.

Alright, so we come to 2009 20101, this is when social media now gets a lot nastier, which is why Millennials got Facebook in college. You had to have a college account to get it for the first few years, so Millennials had flip phones and they didn't. Social media when they were going through puberty they don't get those things until they are in college or later in generation Z. I would define generation Z as the first people who got a smartphone and social media at the beginning of puberty . go through puberty without playing with your friends without talking to others but you know this you know this in front of your face I mean you walk around you know like in New York City are you in Los Angeles?

Where do you live? I live. LA, okay, yeah, so you know, maybe no one walks in La, there's no walking in La, people drive with their phones in front of their faces, there you go, there you go, so I think that's the big difference that um jz went through puberty, especially this. It's especially clear with girls, but it's also true for boys. They went through puberty with something that blocked their interactions with others. They don't spend much time with others. And we have a lot of data on this. The kids used to do it. They spend a lot of time with their friends and as soon as you get to 2012 that plummets to the point where in 2019 kids only spent a little more time with their friends than their parents did which is crazy and when they were with their friends was very similar to what you just said, they can physically be with their friends, but everyone is on their devices, so you know as humans we are an incredibly social species and you can't grow up without a lot of social interaction, but that's what we did to generation Z.

You talk about the irony of democracy. You know, we thought the Internet would be the best thing you know for democracy and it ended up being possibly the worst. The worst for democracy and if you look at the way dictatorial or tyrannical regimes operate, they have cracked down on all of this and not always for propaganda purposes as we know in China, for example, they too. They're worried about their kids spending too much time on the phone, so you know it's just not possible since phones don't physically work for more than a fixed period of time per day, you know, and they like that they can do that and you start. to think you know that democracy could be a great form of government to choose, but is it the best form of government for the flourishing of society?

That's the question, that question goes back to Aristotle and Plato, that's the fundamental question of political theory, which form of government is best and the lesson of but, I definitely still believe in democracy, of course, but, but This is that the Internet and social networks have profoundly changed many things in our lives, you know that it changes the way innovation works. Innovation used to be a hardware model now it is largely a software model. compete against large companies due to computers, the Internet and social networks, and it is a great help for entrepreneurs. I mean, it has had profound, permanent and many positive impacts, but we also have to consider the responsibilities.

And again I go back to the original question where we started, what are the Geniuses Out of the Bottle and I think everyone has their point of view: we need to pass legislation to crack down on social media companies because of their algorithms and us. We have to censor this and we have to stop that and we have to control this and control that and our children, but the reality is we are not doing anything right, we are not doing anything right, we are whining and complaining and everyone thinks they have the solution and none of those are magic bullets, so you spend a lot of time looking at this data and you spend a lot of time and you've written and spoken extensively about the harms and the collective action that you're talking about and which I agree with social animals just can cure social problems socially true, um, but we fell behind on point one, which is how do I organize people to do that, yes, when is exactly what I need to organize them, what is the Internet that is being used, yes, to organize disorganization, becoming deeply philosophical.

Okay, so we have so many threads here, I'll tell you what are you free for the next four hours, are you free for the next four hours? I'm nice, I plan to work on this basically until I die, so yeah, how about we trace the democ threads and then I really want to talk about the effect it's having on the workplace and entrepreneurship. Yeah, I mean, here. I'm teaching at a business school and I haven't really kept up with the trends in work culture over the last two years, while you have, so let's do the democracy thing and then we'll move on to entrepreneurship and business, um , my friend Triston Harris of the Center for Human Technology has long argued that digital technology is helping authoritarian countries become better authoritarian countries.

If you're China, you know, in MA, in the era of Ma or Stalin, like they had to have secret police forces that were brutal but they couldn't be everywhere now they can be everywhere, yeah, so digital technology is a great help forChina and that includes everything you already know, the cameras and the artificial intelligence for facial recognition, so take it all to China. is in much better shape because of the technological revolution, democracy, on the other hand, has all these weaknesses well known since the time of Plato, who said that democracy is the second worst form of government because it inevitably decays into tyranny and he was talking. about direct democracy because people are passionate, they are easily led astray, they respond to demagogues and that's why the American founding fathers knew all this, they read Plato and Aristotle, they knew political theory and history and James Madison said well, how do we design it to that the people cannot make the laws and rules, the people elect the representatives and then the representatives are somehow isolated from the passions of the people so that they can really think together, debate and propose policies, then the people can throw them away.

Find out if they're not happy with that was the system they gave us and boy did that work in the Gutenberg era, the era that was based on print, um, now in the network era, the problems that Madison was trying to solve. solve are overwhelmed, I mean, those problems are. 10x 100x for the reasons that we have been talking about if the citizens are not like voting on election day for who they want, but they give their opinion at every moment so that the people in Congress, I mean, you see this, you know, uh, Ted Cruz, he wants to, uh, he was testifying remotely at a Senate hearing on social media regulation and Ted Cruz, um, gives this, oh, actually, I'm sorry.

Previously, Ted Cruz had given this bombastic speech in the Senate and then sat down. He was caught on camera instantly checking his Twitter account to see how his Senate speech played. so if our politicians are captive to this instant feedback from some random weird kid perverting democracy and then the funny thing I got confused about is that a few months later I was testifying alone over Zoom at a regulatory hearing. and I gave the example of a senator who was caught checking, you know, they asked me if this would affect Congress, I said yes and gave the example, I didn't mention the names of a senator, you know, who was caught doing this and then it turns out that Ted Cruz was in the room and then he asked me his question, which wasn't really a question at all, it was even just going on and on about his Twitter follower count, like that's what he wanted to talk about. about how he thought Twitter was discriminated against him anyway, all I'm saying is, man, it's ruining democracy like we had it in America, well, me, and there, oh, I could go down this rabbit hole a little bit In many directions, this rabbit hole goes deep.

So it goes back to the arena analogy, which is to say, now we have put our politicians in the center of the arena and we want blood and we want a performance and we know that they present themselves grandly and perform for the cameras this way. news, but, uh, but it's not just CNN and Nightly News, now it's like you said, it's instant gratification and some of the veteran congressmen have told me that there was a time when they would support 20% for the cameras and then 80% of the debate of the date was behind closed doors, that is true, yes, and now it is 100% for the chambers And and even when the new President of the House was elected, the number of people said, they did not even HE. he like me, oh my gosh, I didn't know, wow, oh, the number of congressmen that said I don't even know the guy, that's incredible, so I mean, there's not that many of them, there's a few hundred of them and but they don't socialize anymore they don't socialize anymore and there was a time when you moved with your whole family to Washington, you know, and your kids integrated into the school systems and then exactly you went to the baseball games and you went to the meetings from the PTA and you went to school plays and you saw people from the opposite party sitting in the stands with you and you socialized and they didn't do it at all.

They may have been friends or not, but they were sociable and they were civil and they saw each other as humans, they saw each other as parents And and now they spend most of their time in their home states, they say they do the work of their people, but Let's be honest, it's all about fundraising and they spend very little time. in Washington they rarely move their families to Washington anymore, so they don't even see each other as humans anymore and they don't know each other, so how can a ruling class govern and be expected to find common ground with the people? who they only see as the enemy or an abst, worse, worse, an abstract enemy, who is the worst kind, inhuman, right and inhuman, um, so what we are really talking about in all of these things is the restoration of humanity, yeah, if it's if it's teenagers hanging out with teenagers and they all put their phones in a bucket when they come into the house, you know, I mean a good connection, you know, it's the same thing, right, it's the same thing. , that is, if you invite everyone.

The kids come to a play date and they call the parents and tell them if you need your child, call me here's my phone number because I took away all the kids' phones. Yeah, oh, that's great. I am going to write this because it is a piece of advice that I am going to give to parents. Thank you. Here's my phone number. Your children will come to my house. I will take the phone away from your children while they play. Call me if you need it. If you need something. and and and it's, it's, it's, I know someone who did this, and it's that they were really stressed because their kids were addicted to their phones, they decided to go on a family vacation and they made their kids leave the phones on. house, so that was fight number one of course, but it turns out that the parents prevailed because the kids are 13, you know, mhm um and they brought a phone because you have to have a phone, right? mhm and apparently the first two or three.

The vacation days were absolutely horrible fighting and yelling and I want my phone and I miss my friends and then after about two or three days apparently everyone forgot about it and they had a great time and bonded as a family, no one missed their phones and that was magical, the point is like any addiction, there will be some side effects, you will have exactly some withdrawal symptoms, you will have withdrawal symptoms and you will have to allow it, and the problem is we take these phones. away from the kids and they act out and then we immediately give it back to them and like any drug addict it just stinks and it's horrible but you absolutely have to allow the withdrawal symptoms to pass, that's okay and that's why summer camp is It is so important in American society right now that it is very difficult to get your child to rest long enough for the withdrawal symptoms to go away and the dopamine neurons to be restored to Bas's normal baseline level, but summer camp sends his son away for three or four weeks. minimum where most summer camps ban phones I gave a talk to a group of summer camp administrators uh most of them confiscate phones thank goodness uh no one should send their kids to a camp that doesn't confiscate phones um and I I hear the same story so often the kid comes back from camp it's the sweet, you know, it's the sweet 11, you know, 11 years old, which I used to know.

You know, I have a girl of 12 or 13 years old, let's say, and she got all you know in a bad mood. and negative, you send her to camp and get your kid back for a couple of weeks and then they go back to using their phones and the ugly personality comes back, isn't it ironic that parents feel comfortable with their kids' phones being taken away in summer? camp where they're legitimately going to fall off their horses and break their arm, you know, yeah, yeah, but we don't want to take away their phones when they're at school and we have to figure out what time to pick them up like it's It's a huge irony that, well, You know, part of it is the logistician, I mean, logistics is part of it, the idea of ​​your children being taken care of by someone else, so you can take a step back, but what I'm learning, you know, already You know.

I sent my children to my daughter, especially to summer camp. It is now the norm that you receive photos every day, yes, someone is out there taking thousands of photos, yes, and AI, there is something like this. C, I don't know what it's called, but there is a company that uses AI to find your child's photos and send you a personalized set of reports. What this means is that your child is at summer camp away from you for three or four weeks, but every day the child has to perform in front of the camera because mom and dad might be watching which is crazy, so I urge summer camps to stop doing this. send some group photos every weekend, not during the week, um and I urge parents to ask that, ask that camp thing, say, please, you know, would you consider it?

Not sending photos every day is bad for everyone, so going back to the previous line of thinking, which is this resocialization, forcing children to play with each other with parents intervening and taking away their phones is no different than forcing congressmen to go meet each other, I think they should move their families to Washington, you know, if you want to represent the nation, you should move your family to Washington and live there, um and and that started, I think in the '90s, it came with G. New Gingr was the one who said come home exactly fine because he changed the schedule and said he will only do business on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday so you don't have to be there just fly on Monday night or Tuesday the morning, you can fly on Thursday. night um and then you don't even rent an apartment you just share it you know you share a place with some other congressional people in your party so yeah we exhausted your point about humanity is great because I didn't see it. that, but it's the same with children, children need to interact with each other, yes, and we have exhausted it and politicians need to interact with each other and we have exhausted it, so we are surprised that this system does not work yes, yes, is it? you have hope, hope for democracy, I have hope for the children, I really believe that we can solve this, I have no hope for democracy, um, I think that as long as the Internet is not the Internet, the problem is not the Internet per se the Internet per se is amazing , we all love it, no one is considering it, you know, that's inconceivable not having the Internet, social media is not the Internet as long as social media stays the way it is, yeah, and the US Congress stays the way it is.

I have no hope for our country. Now, on the kids' side, it's totally partisan. That's why I think we're going to win there, but on the side of democracy, because the right believes that the left is censoring. they're online and there's probably some truth in that um and my goodness, Google's new AI, what a disaster for Google to launch an AI, you know, the radical left identitarian woke up lecturing nasty, um, you know, I want I mean, why should the right ever trust? Google Now Google has basically shown that we're not here to find the truth, we're here to get you behind these, you know, these progressive values, yeah, so this is part of why I'm very concerned and no.

I see a way out, frankly, oh, can you tell me something that you've been involved in or done in your career? something commercially successful or not, it doesn't matter academically academically successful or not, it doesn't matter, but something you've been involved in something you've done a project you've worked on that you loved and you wish that everything you do could be like that for the rest of your life oh wow, well actually I would say this um this the the the um changing the childhood project um in college I ran a gun control group in the state of Connecticut and that was totally useless and we didn't get nothing done um I've been involved in various progressive movements and causes where we try to persuade people about things and you.

I know it's very difficult to do and I didn't do anything. I helped on some messaging campaigns, how do we change people's minds? It's very hard to do, I didn't do much and now I'm working on this problem, this gigantic problem, the biggest one I've ever worked on um and I don't have to persuade people like everyone's sick of phones, most of them. of parents are fed up, they're upset about what's going on, they just don't know what to do, so all I have to do is First of all, I've spent the last four years thinking deeply about this and doing a lot of research, and that's my greatest pleasure: trying to discover something using the tools of various social sciences, so it was a pleasure. and then I come up with these recommendations and they are very easy to do and there is no opposition, so here are the four rules, if we do these four things, we can't solve them, but we will really improve.

Children's mental health one without a smartphone before high school two without social media before 16 three schools without a phone and four more um um Independence free play and responsibility in the real world children in freedom those four things that essentially cost nothing such maybe some telephone lockers I would have to buy them to bethe one where they are so beat up and there is such a lack of confidence that I think it has these waves that we complain about, but in reality they are symptoms of something else and I think it all comes down to self-confidence. and if any parents and we go back to your work on social media and own phones, if any parents worry about their children's self-confidence, I beg you to reduce the application and access to cell phones and networks social. true, yes, absolutely, but if you're going to take those things away from them, you have to give them something to do that builds something to do, that's right, that's right, and that something to do has to be hanging out with other kids, doing things with kids, yes, that's what they do.

I really need yes and exactly and I think what we believe builds people's self-confidence just by telling them they're great, that's not what it means, you know, letting them solve problems with each other, letting them work things out together, letting them fight. . let them figure it out, you know being a kid is hard, it sucks and especially being a teenager, I mean, it's really hard, and we, we as parents want to hug each other as much as we can, but there is, and you definitely know that. . such a thing as pampering too much, well, that's true, I mean, children are anti-fragile, um and um, uh, let's see, oh, what was I going to say about them being built to be resilient?

You know, when your son likes that he always has fun with me, the analogy is. when a little kid falls down before they cry they look at their parents yeah and if the parents say oh my god the kid starts crying and if the parents say you're okay they just get up and keep playing and it's amazing how they learn to react to pressure and stress. Mhm, that's true, that's right, and very well when we became overprotective. In the 80s and 90s, yes, we weakened their development. I just want to make it clear that it is true.

I want to make a comment about self-esteem, which was a big word in the '70s and '80s, but

psychologist

s do research and

psychologist

s are very suspicious of it. because while self-esteem is a real thing, you don't want to develop a child's self-esteem, that is a really bad thing, what you want to do is develop a child's ability to then do things and, if the child achieves things then he will have a good opinion of yes, but you can't, you can't AR officially say that you're great. I want to build your self-esteem, that's bad for your kids, so, and that's what you know.

That's one of the things that's commonly said about Millennials because in the '80s we really know that as a culture we really got into that and a lot of progressive education still believes that and I think it's making things worse in that sense. Jonathan, thank you very much. I could talk to you for hours. There are so many loose ends we haven't finished and so many rabbit holes. I want rabbit holes. I want to continue, right? as a general surgeon, it's a rabbit hole, you know, that's good, there are a lot more rabbit holes. I want to go deeper with you.

Really, really, thank you for taking the time. It is a pleasure for me. Simon was a lot of fun if you enjoyed this

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