The TRUTH About Social Media & Childhood | Jonathan Haidt X Rich Roll Podcast

God came to Earth and said: would you like to know everything instantly all the time? And we say yes, at this point it's pretty clear that

social

media

is having a detrimental impact on the mental health of the younger generation. American children now spend 5 hours. one day just on

social

media

these technologies that are supposed to bring people together end up separating them physically people have had enough my guest today is Jonathan Height Jonathan is a social psychologist at New York University and is a leading voice in Understanding the complex interaction between technology and

childhood

Why do we all give our children phones at such a young age?

We are afraid that they will then be left out if a system is maintained for fear of losing something and we can all leave. together then we give them back

childhood

we give them back play we give them back to each other Jonathan's latest work, The Anxious Generation, examines the ways in which social media is fundamentally altering how children grow up, how they interact and perceive the world they live in. surrounds them. Jonathan's work. It is vital and his message is loud and clear, now is the time for action. At what age can I, as a child, tell this company all my likes, hopes and fears?

And they can take the data, they can sell it, the data to mark it. Yo, do parents have any control over this? The most effective thing you could do to help your child would be to have today's episode brought to you by the incredible organization that makes this program possible. Nice to meet you, thanks for doing this. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. There's a lot to talk to you about and I was thinking about you the other day. I had to go to Palm Springs and I'm getting close to Palm Springs.

Do you know where those like windmills are? I don't know them. I know if you've ever driven there, but there's like a windmill farm and there's a bunch of billboards and I saw this billboard and it said less on social media and I thought, sure, I know John is behind this campaign. of art where there are billboards and posters and installations that are promoting this anxious generation message and I thought it must be him and then there was another and then there was another and it culminated in this poster that was painted with all this kind of wonderful street art and it said more Snapchat, yes I heard about this and realized that Snapchat is hypocritical and tells you everything you need to know about technology.

You buy with full awareness of the problem and you know the lack of enthusiasm that the corporate social media conglomerate has around this issue. that everyone is aware and excited because of this book, this is a feeling, you know, I think that, suddenly, you are everywhere, this book is, immediately, you like this feeling because it goes right to the heart of what we are doing. We're all thinking about it all the time, yeah, thank you so much Rich for having me, we were at a turning point, even if I didn't write this book and I had the very good luck that I rushed into writing the book. and I felt like I had to get it out soon, it just came out just as America is ready to tip in Britain, they actually tipped last month in Britain, parents are getting up, people have had enough.

I've been studying this since uh. Intensely since 2019, but a little earlier, in 2019, it seemed pretty clear that phones are affecting children. There was an academic debate. I couldn't prove it, but I was filing the case with Jee Twangy and then Covid hit. and it confused us all for several years, what kids really needed before Co was a lot less time on their screens and a lot more time outside playing with each other and then Co came along and what kids in America and around the world got was the Front, a lot more time on their screens, a lot less time playing with other kids face to face and it became clear in 2223 that kids really are a mess.

I mean, mental health is horrible, but what Jee Twanky had shown what I've done. It's been getting worse and worse since 2012, something happened in the early 2010s, mental health fell off a cliff for those born after 1996, not those before, and what we're trying to do. Let's find out what happened on Earth and how we reverse it. So what happened? What was this period of time between 2011 and 2015 that created this tipping point that is impacting Gen Z most deeply? So tell us what those turning points were. We'll start in the 1990s because that's when most of us first saw the Internet and it was wonderful, it was miraculous, you know, it was like God came to Earth and said, would you like to know everything instantly all the time?

They're like, so you know he certainly was a techno optimist. um. I guess I first used alista in 1994 and in the '90s we thought that Internet technology was going to bring down tyrants and that they would be the best friends of democracy, so most. We are all very positive about these developments and it was really surprising. Then we come to the first social networks. You already know. 2003. 2004. Myspace. Facebook. They are connecting people. It's all so surprising. You already know. Uber and Amazon are totally awesome. 2007. The iPhone comes out. and it's not at all harmful, now it's a digital swiss army if you take it out when you need a tool, so everything will be great until you know 2010 or so, teen mental health is fine, it's stable, it's actually improving a little in some aspects. compared to Generation What you have to see is that in 2010 and of course the kids are on their phones all the time we all talk about how they are always texting, but that's all they could do, they could text and they could call, that's what a foldable phone does, that's all, they didn't have high speed.

Internet they didn't have front cameras they didn't have Instagram um they just used their phones to go online okay for the next 5 years uh that's when everyone turns to a smartphone so by 2015 70% of American kids now have it on a smartphone , mainly an iPhone, most girls have a front Instagram camera, high speed internet, an unrestricted data plan, so now you could be online literally all day, like in 2024, about half of American children say they are almost online. all the time this is what is so devastating puberty is this really important period of childhood development where the brain is reconfiguring bits and pieces based on the information it receives and all over the world adult societies help their children through that transition How does a boy become a man?

Does a girl become a woman? and what we did in the early 2010s was we said, how about we don't help you with that at all? How about we give you a device that will get all your attention, like everything that isn't attached to something will go to your phone and a lot of that attention will be focused on random weirdos on the internet who are selected by an algorithm because to how extreme their performances are voted on by other random weirdos on the internet. How about we let that socialize you in all these ways going through puberty and let's say that 2005 as a millennial versus 2015 as Gen Z made all the difference in the world and I think that's what has caused there to be a lot of causes, but that is the most important one? cause of the gigantic increases in anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide that are hallmarks of Generation Z.

Yes, on top of that, you have things like the Like button and the emergence of these algorithms that continue to fragment and atomize us our news sources and the app store that opens the iPhone to a whole universe of new possibilities where billions of dollars are invested in applications designed specifically to hijack our dopamine system and make us addicted, and when you have a young brain that is going through puberty, I mean what's going on. neurologically that makes a human being at that age more vulnerable to the lures and the W's than what one can find on the iPhone and what is the type of permanent damage or what can be undone and what cannot be undone, as described in the book in Chapter 2 and three.

I spent a lot of time analyzing what childhood is. Human childhood is this amazing evolutionary adaptation. It is different from any other species. All mammals have comparatively large brains compared to other taxes and all mammals connect those brains to play. a really important part of being a mammal and really sociable mammals like monkeys, dogs and humans, they have to pay a lot more to develop social skills, so the human brain actually grows very fast in the womb of course , and then it grows a lot and continues to grow. very fast for the first few years, but it reaches 90% of its adult size by the age of six, so after that it's not like you know, oh, I want my child's brain to grow, no, it's not going to grow much more, it is rather the brain. grows this enormous profusion of neurons and synapses that you don't need, you don't need, let's just make a lot of them and then, from the age of six until about the age, you know, 18 20, you know, towards the final part of puberty, the The name of the game is not growth, it is more pruning and trimming, let's eliminate things and the ones that remain we are going to connect them more closely and we are going to put a myelin sheath, a kind of fatty tissue, a fatty substance around them to make them isolated , so if you think about it more, let's put all the supplies on the head at six years old and then let the child loose, that's when he really wants to go out and play, that's when he can take on all kinds of responsibilities. they can take care of the farm animals they can run errands we will send them out into the world and what they will do is tell them the experience will tell the brain what is useful, what we do keep what we cut the fastest cutting period is during puberty so it knows from 6:00 to 10 11 they're playing, they're mastering physical skills their brain is fine-tuning, but once puberty starts, it really accelerates and it doesn't.

Like basic skills like How do I run away from a predator? Or it's all about identity. Who I am? What I do? What is my role here? How can I be a good member of my society? What is prestigious? What is shameful? So it's really social advanced. Development and social development is neurological development, everything has to be based on the brain, so if we think about puberty, especially early puberty, let's say that between 10 and 14 years old I think it is the most vulnerable age, especially for girls, boys and children. A little bit later, that's the period when we need to be more careful about our children's experience and unfortunately that's exactly the period in America now and in Britain elsewhere where we give them their first smartphone around 10 or 11 years old.

He now dominates high school. by smartphones during class is dominated by smartphones that kids are on, they're texting, and so in many ways we've abdicated our responsibility to help our kids sharpen their brains, which we have handed everything over to the mhm phone and although covid may not be the immediate cause of this, it certainly accelerated or exacerbated it during that period of time, but on top of that, we also have the reduction of extracurricular programs and all kinds of other on-air activities free or community programs that were more part and parcel of our childhood that seems to have gone the way of the dodo okay let's talk about that where did you grow up

rich

outside of Washington DC? okay, in a suburban suburb, okay, at what age could you ride your bike and go visit your friends, I mean super young second grade third grade seven or eight out all day yeah, be at home for dinner, that's right, that was a universal thing and you and I grew up during a crime wave, there were drunk drivers, there was crime in the '90s, things got really bad safe crime went down, drunk driving went down, you know, Mothers Against Drunk Driving we locked up drunk drivers, so when you and I were young and this goes back literally millions of years, kids are not in adult supervised programs, are alone. and that is absolutely crucial to developing independence.

We want our children to be self-governed and supervised so they don't have to have someone tell them what to do, but in the 990s we started locking them up and supervising them saying we can never stop. Go out alone because there is a microscopic chance that you will be kidnapped, but that looms large in my mind because I just read a story in some newspaper at the time.This is called availability bias in psychology and is on the side of all our milk cartons. That's right, that's right, the book focuses on the big rewiring that is 2010 to 2015, but there's a really important backstory which is the more gradual loss of childhood, independence, loss of trust in children and the loss of trust in each other, which turns out to be a.

One of the main reasons we locked up our children was because we began to think that every adult was a potential child molester. I can't trust my son with anyone I have to supervise or you just know a very limited number of people I will trust, whereas when I and I were growing up during the crime wave, adults generally had the feeling that if a kid falls off his bike, you know, and gets hurt and you see it, you'd call his mom and say, well, you know what your phone number is, all of us knew our phone numbers and that went away in the '90s. when we lost trust in each other and that's part of why we hold our children so close that we don't allow them to develop mhm and the irony is that we are hyper or over protective of our children in physical spaces and completely under protection in thisThe digital space that we are learning that we are discovering is much more dangerous than the threat imagined in the physical world, that's right, and that's why I started by talking about the incredible techno optimism that we all had in the '90s and 2000s because we thought this was incredible and we saw that even in the 80s you knew kids who played with computers and we called them Geeks and nerds.

Wow, they're starting companies, now you know they're doing amazing things with this. new technology hey, there's my son playing with an iPhone, maybe he'll grow up and start a company, maybe he'll become smarter and more technically skilled, but that didn't happen, we have all this technological optimism where we think computers They are good. our kids think, oh we need to bring computers to all the kids you know in the 90s or early 2000s, oh it's terrible that

rich

kids have computers but poor kids don't, we need to make all kids have a computer and, of course, Of course, the technology companies, you know, want to come in, they want to give kids, you know, Chromebooks, have them use our operating system, so we let this happen because we thought, well, it looks like it's probably going to be good for them and there was no data on that and we weren't really collecting any data and we just let the devices take over in infancy and it was only right before covid that we really started to notice it but then came Co and It confused us all and now we lost some years.

Co has backed off now. I think everyone sees the rubble and that's why you started talking about how it feels like you know things are changing everyone sees it yeah now that Co has stepped back we all see the rubble yeah I'm trying to remember the feeling. that we had when the Internet was new and there was a sense of possibility and excitement, and it's hard to judge ourselves against the optimistic promise that the Internet had at the time, like how could it be bad to connect everyone and have access to information? This way you can only make the world a better place.

The irony is that this hyperconnectivity is generating loneliness, depression, self-harm, suicide and all that, in this thesis about this great rewiring, like what are the ones I want to say? You've identified four key harms that are at play here, yes, so this started. I was going to focus. I thought about social media and girls because that's where the data is clearest, but as the story developed, I dug deeper. In my childhood I realized that I needed a separate chapter for girls. I need a separate chapter for kids, but there are a lot of things that affect everyone and adults too, so I ended up calling the four fundamental harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction.

So, very briefly, American kids now spend 5 hours a day on social media alone, which is mostly Tik Tok and YouTube shorts. It's the short videos and also the longer videos on YouTube and also Instagram and a bunch of other things, it's five hours just on social media. media and then another three to five hours depending on studying, another three to five hours on other screen-based activities and none of this includes homework, this is all just leisure, so you know, 8 to 10 hours a day on their devices, which expels almost everything. Otherwise, or at least minimize it, think about all the good things you did when you were a child or think about all the things you would want for your children today.

Would you like them to have a hobby? Would you like them to read books? going outside to play like everything you could want for your kid, cut it by 90% because they have to spend all this time fixing their network connections and keeping up with what's on Tik Tok, so you cut out all that stuff that really matter so that the two that are fundamental, the two that we know are really important for mental health and child development are time with other children and sleep, who could argue with this and the data on social deprivation is just impressive.

A couple of my favorite graphics. in the favorite book because they are, you know, kind of horrible, but they are dramatic. One is the amount of time that Americans spend with each other, so these are studies, the American Time Use Survey. I think it's called, they ask people to fill out detailed logs of what we're doing right now right now and when you look at just the time outside of work at school, how much time do you spend with your friends? And for the older people you know who are 30 or older, it's less than an hour a day because people are busy, they're married, but for teenagers it was always like two and a half, it was a lot, they spent a lot of time with their friends, like you know us, you and me, after school you just hang out with your friends, so that starts to drop in the '90s and '00s as kids spend more time in front of the TV and more time on the internet, it's decreasing, but when you get to 2010 2012 it plummets, it falls very quickly and a surprising finding is that you know for For the older generations, you see that it falls with Co, as you see, it goes from 40 minutes to 20 minutes, as if we were really locked in , you really see a drop, but for teens, what you see is the drop from 2019 to 2020 with the post-Co. restrictions no steeper than the drop from 2018 to 2019 oh, that's interesting, in other words, you know they were social distancing so fast since 2012 that covid didn't even speed it up.

Wow, yeah, you would have thought Covid would have been this pattern disruptor. We don't recover from that and that would be particularly for a teenager, but to understand that they were already in a state of decline at that time and they haven't recovered, that's right, they plateau or continue to go down. I don't know because we just know it takes a while to get the data, so here we are in 2024. I don't have data for 2023, we have data for 2022, some data is available for 2023, so we can start looking at it. I know about the Co bounce, but at the time you study I haven't seen it, yes, but of course, that would be an interesting prediction if the adults went down and then went up a little bit, that's what would be expected, so my prediction would be that The teenagers who fell so far are not going to recover because it's not like oh CO is gone hey today after school how about I come to your house like I don't think that's going to happen because they've gone down ? they've acclimated to a different way than they've acclimated to and in the case of kids, they literally can't check each other's houses if they want to play video games, they have to be in their own group, that's right, they have to have your own equipment in your own home.

So these technologies that are supposed to bring people together end up separating them physically, so the social deprivation part, the sleep deprivation part, are relatively evident. I would like to know a little more about this idea of ​​fragmentation of attention. This idea of ​​being constantly distracted and having to switch your brain because things happen so fast, that's right, you know, we all think we can multitask, but research has shown for decades and decades that if you try to do two things, I'll do each. one of them less than half, as if there is a net loss for the transfer cost, so multitasking is a bad idea with our phones.

The temptation is always to multitask, that's just part of it; The worst part is the notifications and interruptions. When the iPhone came out in 2007, there were no push notifications, there was no app store, it was just a set of tools that you could use whenever you wanted, like you said before you got the retweet button, the like button, things become much more viral now. It's urgent for this to explode, you need to know. Apple introduces, I think they're called software development kits that allow any other company to create an app and this is transformative because what's happening now is kids are now carrying this, you know?

As of 2010, because they have a portal through which any company can contact your child, any company can send them a notification. I mean, if they downloaded the app only once they downloaded it, it's like they were giving permission to this company. you can interrupt my son whenever you want oh you think there's breaking news oh you can get 10% off this oh you know someone said something about you so we've created these awesome interrupting devices that everyone can use We are fighting, right? I mean, we adults, I don't use my phone much because I'm always in front of a computer and I turned off almost all notifications, that's really crucial, you have to turn off almost all notifications except Uber, you know some things. you have to go, um, but it's hard for me to concentrate because if I'm doing something that's difficult, a part of my brain says what's the weather going to be like, oh, let me go check it out, yeah, let's get some, you know, and then 40 minutes later so that you return to that state where you can write or work, but you and I have fully developed the prefrontal cortex, that is what happens in mid or late puberty, that is, the brain rewires itself from behind forward. and it's not until late adolescence that the prefrontal cortex, which is the seed of executive control, decision making, uh, self-control, those aren't really, you know, really set in until late adolescence, it's because That is why young teenagers are as impulsive and have neurons as you imagine.

These neurons like to try to find each other, which way we grow, you know what needs to connect, and instead of having a normal human experience where the job will be done pretty well, you add, you know, this like a party of giant dance and all kinds of uh. extra dopamine and you know, not sleeping a lot, it's going to affect the nerves and the addiction, if there's one thing we've all learned, I'm in recovery, I'm part of that community, but I think everyone has a smartphone now. I think everyone has a better understanding of what the feeling of adding it is because we all have that appeal.

You know we can't leave it. When we're bored, we just can't help it. Look at it, but what's particular about the pubescent mind when all that myelination is happening and those neurons are trying to figure out where to connect? When you introduce this thing that actually tastes, it hijacks that dopamine system, what is it doing to that process? of the developing brain, that's right, one of the revelations, you know, Francis pulled out thousands of pages, you know, screenshots of internal Facebook communications and one was a seminar or a document or something prepared by some Facebook staff for another Facebook staff on adolescent brain development.

And it explains how the emotional centers are very active and develop early in puberty, but the prefrontal cortex is much later, so there is this period that is really the optimal point for social networks, which are especially adolescents, You know, from 13 to 17 years old. Very heavy users, there is a sweet spot for them where emotions are high and social concerns are intense. They really want to know what people think about them, but they don't have much self-control. They don't have the ability to say. No, I need to do my homework. I'm not going to check Instagram right now so they know that's the vulnerability and then they try again.

They are not trying to harm children, but they are trying to win the race to support themselves. your attention MH, for all these reasons that is why I say that one of the most important things we can do is increase the age at which anyone can open a social media account. I think I should be 18 in terms of health, but you know my goal. is to give ourselves clear standards that we can achieve, so I say 16, if I said 18, I don't think we can achieve it, but 16 I think is achievable, so no one should be on social media,no child should be on social media until they are.

They're 16, let's stick with addiction because I actually have a question for you, so there's a debate in the academic literature. I've been warned to be careful using the word addiction for smartphones because the addiction research community is clear, obviously, you know. heroin, nicotine, they are very well understood neurochemical systems that involve dopamine neurons, so chemical addictions are very well understood behavioral addictions. Some people apparently say you shouldn't call it addiction, you should call it compulsive use or problematic use for me. It sure sounds like addiction. If you think slot machines are addictive for some people, not for most, but for some people this sounds a lot like that, but I'd love to hear from you because you certainly have experience with chemical addictions.

Could you tell me first? What were your chemical addictions? uh alcohol the main one yeah it's the main one so yeah what do you think about the similarity difference? My thoughts on this have evolved as if I were indoctrinated in 12ep and AA and that has a There is a very rigorous definition and philosophy about what is an addiction and what is not, but over many years I have really expanded what I would classify it as addiction. I think it lands on a much broader spectrum than we understand. and you know, when I got sober, if you were an addict or an alcoholic, that meant you were a drunk or someone who couldn't get the needle out of their arm, but I think we all fall somewhere on that spectrum and some people just have the slightest dust of compulsive addictiveness, you know, when you get to the other end of the spectrum, compulsivity and addiction start to seem like the same thing and maybe they are, but you know it as you slide towards greater compulsivity and your tree of decisions becomes increasingly narrow.

It's starting to look more like what's on the other end of the spectrum, so I have a very liberal definition of addiction and I would say that what you're talking about falls squarely within that, whether or not it appears in the DSM, okay? So we are exposing our children to something that can make many of them addicted. Now you know that some reject me. other researchers, which is good and healthy, this helps us all get closer to the

truth

, especially in video games, who say no, you know, video games are good for children and you know they mention some benefits and coordination, things like that in Digging into the data on addiction, what I found, what I report in the book, is that video games are not particularly harmful to boys in general and on average, while social media is harmful to girls in general and, on average, not for everyone. but you already know a lot, but what you have to keep in mind is that, in both cases, what we find is that between 2 and 15%, depending on the Criterion count, have addiction or what is called problematic or compulsive use that interferes with other important domains. of life so you know, even if you want to take a very generous view and say, oh, you know, most kids are not addicted and that's true, most kids are not addicted to their phones, most of children are not addicted to social networks, they are addicted to video games. but if it's like 10%, if it's like five or 10%, they're kind of addicted, that's amazing, like we would never let our 10-year-olds do something if we thought it was like, you know, Russian roulette, you know, you have a, you have.

There's a one in 10 chance that this will turn into something that damages your life and possibly changes your brain development and takes up most of your adolescence, so you're not going to do anything else, so you know, I definitely don't want to. put It is said that parents do not let their children play videos. I wouldn't want to say that, but I know something you know. High digits will become more or less addicted, so you really have to be careful with that. that's your spectrum too, so you think it's a personality trait, like some people just have a brain that will be easily drawn into addiction and others have a much harder time attracting it.

I think that's still the case. I think there are certain people who are more prone to this, I think so, but I'm not sure anyone is in an opt-out situation, you know? They simply haven't found the right behavior or the right substance. Well, okay, but that also raises the possibility that maybe whatever. What happens here is not exactly addiction, it's just being trained, so if you want to train a dog correctly, some EX reward system in your brain, that's right, we all have the reward system in the brain that works especially through of dopamine neurons that not only make you feel good, I mean, you know, people commonly assume that, oh, if you eat a piece of chocolate, you get dopamine, ah, that feels good as a reward, but dopamine has this property interesting that it's not just like, oh, you did well, but it's immediately tied to motivation. getting more is like oh that was good I want more oh that was good I want another one and that's why you know if you have a fry it's not just like oh delicious it's like I want I want more give me more give me more So I think this raises the possibility of that even if you are almost immune to chemical addiction, well, no one is immune, but if you are on the end of the spectrum that you established, if a system is designed so that it can train you the way a dog trainer trains a dog, gives you a little reward if you do something, oh you know, you added something to your profile, a little reward, oh, you had a good post, your little reward, uh, it's possible that we can all be trained through Operate conditioning . do these behaviors and then we watch how our hand moves and we say but I don't want to do that, why do I keep doing it?

Why do we continue doing it? Because our brains match patterns and then we have this Consciousness sitting on top of it. and Consciousness says what the hell is going on down there if you're like me, never without a water bottle, let's do this right, people let me rock your world with my new favorite toy that's actually not a toy at all, it's not a toy. Necessary Necessary Camel Back Steel Podium 100% % Leak Proof Water Bottle Emphasis on leak proof for all you Gearheads, this is designed for the bike, but honestly, this simple yet elegant stainless steel gadget is designed for anything and keeps everything you put on it cold. for hours and straight up goes everywhere I do for all the weight freaks.

Campell actually also offers an ultralight titanium version, very beautiful, shall we level up? Yes, we will, because right now Campell is offering an exclusive discount just for all of you. people so stop what you're doing and type Campell back.com sign up with your email and use my code Rich Roll to get 20% off your entire purchase at checkout or you can click the link at description below, let's talk a little. more about the differences between boys and girls, you have all these graphs throughout the book, many of which are basically hockey sticks, but not in all cases, but I would say in the vast majority of cases throughout of all of these graphs is much more extreme in It's the case for girls younger than it is for boys, yeah, great, so the way to think about it is that in any behavior related to anxiety and depression, those are the internalizing disorders, there will always be girls and women above boys. and men in terms of the mean in terms of how high the line is, that's always the case, the one big exception is that when you look at completed suicides, when you look at actual deaths, boys and men are much more higher than girls and women and that has always been the case, boys and men tend to use irreversible means, they tend to use a gun at least in the United States or a tall building, while girls and women have many more suicide attempts, but they tend to use reversible means, they tend not to end up killing them.

So the urge to commit suicide, the thinking about suicide is different in boys and girls, and suicide is especially a plague that is destroying children, but it affects both, so that is just the background when we look at the rate of suicide. increase, what we generally find is that things were pretty stable in the 2000s, no the lines don't really go up or down on the suicide line, like I said, you go down a little bit and then everything goes up? What we found is that the sharpness of the rebound is much more for girls. Those are the girls, it's like nothing is happening.

The lines are stable and then, boom, you get to 2013 and they all go up, whereas for the guys, it's more curved, the guys start going up a little bit earlier, like even in 2008, 2009, and that could be this is speculative. but it may be that as boys are playing more and more multiplayer video games, they are moving away from being physically present with their friends before girls, but I'm not sure about that, in any case, the point is the child mentality. Health begins to show some signs of deterioration before 2010 and then accelerates in the 2010s, but it is not directly linked to 2013 as girls are and the percentage increases are correct, they are generally larger for girls, but not altogether. sometimes the boys' percentage increase is similar, they're just at a lower level, so their graph doesn't look as much like a hockey stick as the girls' MH, so how would we like to understand this?

Can you analyze what is happening here? that's creating that differential yes, yes, so what I do in the anxious generation is expose what childhood is, what adolescence is, um and how we subvert it, and all of this would suggest a gradual change in mental health, that is , not a single year like you. I know for 5 or 10 years that's the broader story and it's true for both boys and girls, but then there are some things happening specifically for girls and I think the main thing is that the key year where everyone connect with each other is 2012 2013. and the reason is that, as we said before, they are moving from foldable phones to smartphones, that is part of it, they go from having no notifications to many notifications, that is part of it, they go from no having a front camera to front camera which is part of this, you get filters where girls can press a button and make themselves more beautiful, but I think the real thing you need to pay attention to is that in 2012 Facebook buys Instagram, before that it had very little. user base, you know, adult photographers used it.

Facebook doesn't change the platform much in its early years, but that's the year when there's big publicity, that's the year when all the girls get along. I must say it becomes normal and typical for teenage girls even in high school to begin with, you know you lie about your age, you can open an Instagram account and that's how it is when you do Super Connect, girls are much more vulnerable to emotional contagion than the boys because of the friend dynamic of the group, well, it's a lot. Of things, in part, there is a very profound psychological difference, as Simon Baron, one of the leading autism researchers, describes, that children are a little more on the spectrum towards autism in the womb, we all start out as female fetuses with female bodies and brains and then when testosterone kicks in around the 10th week of gation, the testicles kick in, you get a little bit of testosterone, the body starts to change into the male pattern and the brain starts to change into the male pattern male and the male pattern is higher in systematization.

Lower. as for empathizing, this is just on average, there are a lot of exceptions, but kids change a little bit, you know they are more likely to like reading subway maps and computer programming and things that are highly systematizing. Boys will grow up to read Popular Mechanics, while girls will. slightly lower on systematizing higher on empathizing care more about what happens to other people remember more about oh how is your sister the last time you told me you know she knows she had appendicitis think about who she's related to who and how then girls are a little more socially aware, the differences here are not big in ability, but they are very big in interest, what boys like to do if you give them freedom versus what girls like to do girls if you give them freedom it's really different and therefore when they are social.

The media comes in and instantly you can see how everyone relates to everyone, what everyone says about everyone behind door number one, door number two, you can form teams that will fight each other with swords and flamethrowers, what door you want and the girls say. I'll take door number one, most guys. I'll take door number two. Now video games aren't particularly harmful unless you play them a lot and you know you get addicted, whilethat social media I think was harmful for most girls because you are super connecting girls who are more open to sharing emotions and what emotions they share well, even if they were positive, negative.

A basic truism in psychology is that the bad is stronger than the good, so in a marriage, John Godman's research, if I say it twice. As many good things for my spouse as there are criticisms or bad things we are headed for divorce very quickly because a five to 1 ratio is the minimum, like it's five good things for one thing, you know, then maybe you'll be okay, but the bad thing is stronger than good and therefore if some girls share their anxiety, their depression, which is incredibly contagious, will literally make other girls directly more likely to be depressed and anxious and also conveys a subtle message of valuation that It is prestigious to do this.

It's gratifying that if you do this you get a lot of support and the more you do it the more support you get, so I guess I can't prove this, but I think we often see this big jump between 2012 and 2013 for girls. and I think it's because that's when they hyperconnected and that's when they started sharing contagious emotions. I also imagine the kind of obvious and easy thing about knowing what everyone in your friend group is doing all the time and you know 247 comments about where. you are within that group dynamic and if you are not invited to the party and you can see, you know what is happening at the party in real time, well, you sit at home, that is fine and good because this gives me the opportunity to speak about Snapchat, which I don't talk about that much, but I'll start.

My daughter is 14 and really wants Snapchat. I didn't let her have Instagram in high school and she's really cool with it. He could see that the way she put it. Girls on Instagram are stupid. She told me that in seventh grade as if she could see what she's doing to girls. But she wants Snapchat because that's what everyone uses. You know, you know. You could do it all with text messages. everything on Snapchat, so I wasn't sure what to say about Snapchat. First of all, I had a strong feeling that we don't have as much research on it as we do on Facebook and Instagram, which have been around longer and are more widely used.

It used to be that I had a general feeling that Snapchat wasn't that bad because it's mostly just texting, you know, texting with pictures, you know how bad that could be. My opinions on Snapchat are becoming more negative as I think about a few features, one being. the heat map while you were describing the ability to see where everyone is, so do you feel left out? Someone was telling me that you know that her son organized a party and promised you that there would only be about 15, 20 children, two or three. a hundred showed up because once they could see that everyone was there, they all went, so this kind of mob Dynamic A desperate fear of not being left out, so that's bad.

Another thing that's really bad about Snapchat is the streaks that I think the company should be ashamed of. um they claim they are trying to help kids they are helping them connect the streaks which is where you know they will tell you oh you know you have a two day streak with this person don't break the streak you better send them something today so you have to all these kids who have other things to do in their life they have to attend to their Snapchat streaks they have to sit there they have to post and post and post and post not because they really want to but to keep the streak going that's an example of a characteristic which is just done Posting dictations and forcing them to stay on it is an evil feature.

Snapchat should be ashamed of itself. You should remove that feature. It's just bad for children. That's one this morning. I read another article in the Wall Street Journal. He has been excellent at this. about really tracking what social media companies are doing to our children. uh, a feature I didn't know about. Now they show you everyone's social world as a solar system. Have you heard about this? Do you know about this? Uhh, I hadn't heard of this. About this until this Wall Street Journal article this morning, so apparently if you're a paying subscriber, apparently you can pay $4 a month to get the premium service.

If you are a paying subscriber, then it shows you your social universe as if you were here. here are the people closest to you, as we calculate based on your communication, we can see that this is this person is your Mercury, they are the closest to you and this other person, oh, you know, she is, you know Neptune, okay, so you get to see that for yourself, you can see it for everyone else and so you can see that this person who you thought was your best friend, you actually know is Mary, who is her Mercury and I am her Mars. , as if it were outside where Mars is.

Like, wait, what's going on, so this is a cruel and cruel feature. I mean, I can't believe they do this to kids. I've never heard of that, yeah, me neither. I think it might be a new feature, but it would be insensitive, yes. oh, it's horrible, so you know, I think Snapchat has a lot to answer for because I haven't bothered them so far, but I'm going to start bothering them. I really think they are doing bad things to our children, you teach young people. at New York University in business school and I know you've done a survey and you ask for a show of hands who would be willing to give up their social media accounts or how much money it would take, how much they would have to pay. pay you or you would pay to leave it so explain a little bit about what you discovered by doing this so my whole analysis and this is the main theme of the book is that we are all trapped in a set. of collective action problems, um, that people are in this not because they like it, but because they feel like they have to be and because everyone else is like that, it's like that, social scientists have studied them for, you know, 50 100 years.

Collective action problems such as common goods. problem, that is the center of my analysis, a great study was published, it is a working paper, it was put online last October by some professors at the University of Chicago. Leonardo Buron is the main author, so I read this after reviewing the manuscripts. It's not in the book, but I mentioned it in this Atlantic article I wrote a few weeks ago. What they did was they said to college students at various schools, how much would we have to pay you to get off Instagram or Tik? Tok, you know, some were studies on Tik Tok, some Instagram, how much do we have to pay you to go out for a month and you know people say a certain amount of money.

I think the average was $50, but you know some people went a lot more, this is a standard thing economists do to measure the total value of something to society. You know, if I told you, what if you didn't use any mapping programs? Know? Street mapping programs for a month, how much would you pay? pay to avoid that, well that's a pretty good measure, you know how people really value this, we all get it for free, but in reality you know it's worth a trillion dollars of the total sum of Americans or you know humans, so it's a common thing.

Economist technique by that measure Tik Tok and Instagram are incredibly valuable companies that offer enormous value for free, we all get it for free, okay, but this is not a normal consumer product, it's like an addictive drug, it's a trap and the way they showed it. what they found was that they said in another condition, they said okay, now we're trying to get the vast majority of people at your university to do this as a mass experiment, how much would we have to pay them to participate in that? We can get almost everyone else out, how much would we have to pay him to get out?

I don't know if they filled in the blank or if they had a lot of options, but it went from being like I had to do it. Pay me X dollars, I'd pay get off there and I thought this was amazing because it really shows in econometric terms how devastating this is, you know, Tik Tok, I mean, look, Tik Tok and Instagram obviously create value for business creators. I'm not saying they are a net obstacle to business. economy in general, but if you include if you really look at the way they absorb the attention and happiness of so many people, it is possible that these things have a gigantic negative value for society, so I read that article and then I verified it with my students They are at NYU Stern and I found the same thing.

I made it in a very simple format. What I did was I asked them first. I told you: how many of you watch Netflix at least once a week? All hands raised. How many of you would prefer? That Netflix was never invented You would rather live in a world without Netflix. Hands are not raised because Netflix is ​​stories and they are really good. They are high quality stories. You know, you know, people sometimes watch them too much, but no. I don't say ah, I wish this had never been invented mhm, then I said, "Okay, how many of you check Tik Tok at least once a week?

Not all hands know, but the vast majority raise their hands. I say only those of you who use Tik Tok." How many of you would prefer that Tik Tok was never invented? Almost every hand went up and I say, why don't you get off? They say we can't because everyone else is connected. We have to know what videos and Trends they are talking about. This used to be Instagram, I think it was the most harmful program. I think it really had a big impact on girls in the early 2000s. Tik Tok only became super popular a little bit before Co and during Co, so we have very little data on it.

I'm not saying that we have studies that show that Tik Tok is doing this, but from what I've seen about the previous part of the big wiring, I suspect that Tik Tok is the worst, but I want to say that it reaches its power to train its power to reinforce its power to shape beliefs, so I think Tik Tok is an unparalleled danger to our children, the problem with collective action is that as much as you want to get out of it, you just aren't going to because everyone else is in it and Therefore, the solution or the responsibility of solving this problem cannot fall on the shoulders of the individual.

We need to turn to governments, to specific organizations, to schools, to the technology companies themselves. You know, this is like the last third of your book. All these solutions. that we should be talking about and enacting to counteract what we're seeing, so talk a little bit about what those Solutions are and I mean, you're optimistic about this. I am optimistic that we can change and I believe that because most people want to change because these four Standards that I propose are actually quite easy to do if we all do them together, so I think we can do it even if we never get help from Congress and here's why, the first Norma is not a smartphone before the top. school because all parents are in a trap the reason you give your child a phone when they are 10 or 11 is because she says mom, everyone else has a phone and I'm out if I don't have one. alone, that really breaks everyone's heart, we gave up because everyone else gave in, but if we can set a clear standard, how about we just don't give a smartphone until high school, let's eliminate this nonsense from high school, let them let's give them a flip phone, okay because you know, I understand that you need to be able to text them about pick up or after school activities.

I'm not saying we go back to the way you and I were raised when you knew we didn't have phones with us. all the time, but flip phones don't seem to have hurt Millennials, so give them a flip phone or a watch with a phone, you know, like an Apple Watch. Many parents tell me that they are doing well there, so that is the first rule that would at least allow children to go through early puberty before spending their entire lives online, but that is still, on some level, an element of individual action, parents do it, not systems, no, that's right, but this is like me.

I don't think it makes sense to have a law that says you can't make yourself known if you want your child to have an intelligence that you can't like. In Britain they are talking about there being some proposal for that, but we could never do that in America and I wouldn't want us to do it, so it can be done, as long as I mean it would be helpful if the school gave guidance and We'll get to that in a moment, so no smartphones until age 14, no social media. media until 16 and that's what the new Florida law does, which I think is fantastic, that was the original law, you just can't open a social media account until you're 16, there was pushback, there is an argumentlibertarian that you know that Do you know who you are to tell me how I can raise my children, which is okay for me?

Florida law allows 14- and 15-year-olds to open an account if they have explicit parental permission, and I'm excited to see if that law forces companies to finally develop a parental permission form. Nowadays, kids they can go anywhere, pornhhub, anywhere, no parental permission, no age verification, nothing and that law is relatively ineffective until protocols are established on the technology platforms themselves to verify identity, yes, that's right, but we have to force them to do it because they desperately don't want to. It's going to be difficult for them. They are going to lose many customers. Your user base will plummet because many of them are Bots.

They are not real people. anyway a lot of them are kids so anyway second rule no social media until 16 third is no phone schools you know you can tell your kid no I want you to keep your phone in your locker and don't have it with you during class, but if everyone else texts, then you have to text; otherwise you're left out, that seems to be the first order of business, it's the easiest and perhaps the easiest to implement, it's the one I'm most excited about because it's the one I think we're going to achieve this year, literally in 2024 , if you're listening to this

podcast

, if your kids go to a school where they're allowed to keep their phone in their pocket, contact the school principal and say please make the school phone free.

Our children's education is plummeting. They are literally getting stupider since 2012 after decades and decades of progress going up. Academic scores are going down, not because of Bueno. Co, yes, but it started after 2012, it's the phones and me. I can tell you that all principals hate phones, school, all teachers hate phones, they just can't turn them off because some parents get scared and yell at them, but if we can get more parents to say please give my kid six hours a day. where they can attend to the teacher and the other kids because otherwise they come to school and they're just talking on the phone like they're talking on the phone during class, they're talking on the phone in between classes, they're talking on the phone during lunch like it's why bother going to school, then, schools without a phone, that's a must, it's easy, there's no obstacle to it, there's no cost, I mean, it costs a little to buy phone lockers, but that's it, it's the most powerful thing we can do well.

The last one is the most difficult. The last one is that we have to give our children much more independence, free play and responsibility. In the real world, we have to give them back a normal human childhood where they have some independence to make small mistakes and make small decisions. risks if we're going to reduce screen time, you know, let's say 80 or 90% for middle school kids, is my hope. I just made that number up. I should be more precise, but you know we have to get rid of it. from most screen use through at least middle school and elementary school.

So we have to give them not only something to do, we have to restore to them what a normal childhood is, which is a lot of independent play and we have to give them. them chores and responsibilities, I mean running errands, going to the store, these are great things to do. Today's children feel useless. This appears in many surveys. They say my life has no purpose. Sometimes I feel useless. Sometimes I feel like I'm not good. in general, all this really starts in 2012 2013 and the more we let our children be part of the family, do some jobs, run errands, the more they will feel useful, so those four reforms, if we do them, I think we will not implement them . back to the end, but I think for the first time we will see these upward curves, they are going to turn around, they are going to go down, the suicide rate will go down, the depression rate will go down again, I can't say that it will go back down to where it was in 2010, but I think we can really lower it and so far it has only gone up.

I'm G to play devil's advocate for a minute. Gosh, I love that there are a variety of arguments, uh, counterpoints to your thesis. The first is that I understand everything you say, but it is all correlative, there is no indication that social media and these platforms are causing the conditions you are talking about. There was a nature article that was just published about this. There are many other causes why we must look at economic disparity and lack of opportunity. The opioid crisis. Things like this. the other big problem is this typical moral panic that we see in every generation that you have, those are the three arguments that I hear, okay, let's go over them, those are exactly AR, let's get those three right, so the first thing is that everything is correlational, so we all know it. that correlation doesn't show causation we need experiments well guess what experiments we have there are a lot of them so I get really fed up when journalists and other researchers say oh everything is correlational no the fact that we have hundreds of correlational studies mostly.

Of which show an effect, a correlation does not negate the fact that we also have dozens of experiments that show causality studies, like when you assign children to disconnect from social media for a month if you assign them to disconnect for a day or two . they're not happier because, of course, if you take someone off heroin for a day or two, they're not happier, but those who do it for a month or more, the vast majority find an effect, so that's the name of the game experiments because we Go to my subst after.com. I have a whole post outlining this is what we know from correlational studies here are the dozens of longitudinal studies that allow you to infer causality here are the dozens of experiments that allow us to infer causality more strongly, so there is a lot of experimental evidence , so it is simply not true that everything is correlational.

The second thing is that the skeptics, the ones who say I don't have the evidence, are using a standard of proof that is equivalent in the legal field. system to Beyond Shadow Beyond A Reasonable Doubt and that's what we use in science for our journals, we all review articles for journals and we don't say, you know, this is probably true, this is probably not true, no, we say, have you shown that is this statistically? It's very unlikely that it happened by chance, that's the mentality we're all in, it's like we're all the criminal lawyers you know, like we're not, we can't be convicted until we have overwhelming evidence, but we're in a public health situation. emergency does not use that standard in a public health emergency knows that a disease is spreading it seems to be Coler but we are not 100% sure let's not do anything no, we will not do anything until we are sure now that the things I propose cost nothing and They don't hurt, the cost of doing nothing is enormous and the skeptics say that they used to say that everything is correlational and correlations are almost zero, well no, actually, now there are experiments and correlations.

It turns out that we actually all agree that it's around 0.15 in the data sets where you can infer it for girls and social media, it's around the correlation coefficient around 0.15, they used to say it's just in United States as if they were really phones. It would be in other countries, guess what we now know. It is also in other countries. It is in all English-speaking countries. It is in northern Europe. It is in the freest countries where children are not so anchored. It is a normal academic debate. uh you have a right to raise it, this was just a review article by Candace Candace aers, who is a major researcher in the field, but I have answers to that in my substack and I'll write another one soon to put it all together, that's one which was the next one you said Moral panic Moral panic So it's a moral panic in the sense that it superficially resembles previous moral panics.

It starts with people making statements about what is happening. The parents get scared. The media gets it. So these means. researchers there's a small group of them that criticize me for this because they say it's just another moral panic um to what I'm saying, I see your point, it might seem that way at first, but if you think about the boy who cried wolf, panic around ya You know, 18th century novels and comics and all these previous moral panics that the lesson of the boy who cried wolf is not therefore the wolf will never come good the lessons don't really lie, but the point is that You know, even if the two first alarms were false, there may still be a real emergency and in previous moral panics we did not see suicide rates increase by 50%.

In previous male moral panics we didn't see a sudden collapse of Teen Mental. Health in previous moral panics the stories were in the media it was a story in the media about a kid who you know smoked marijuana and went and killed his parents like you read about these strange stories that's not what's happening Now, what's happening now is everyone seeing it, if not in their own children, then in their friends' children, so in many ways this is very different from previous moral panics. I think Jee Twangy and I are called alarmists, but I think the proper term is alarms, we're sounding an alarm, we could be wrong, I don't think we are, and I think there's more and more evidence that this is a big meltdown. international adolescent mental health.

Oh, and you said that the economic factor, that was the third, was what is called factors. economic gun violence opioid crisis all these other things that are pretty much yeah, that's true, that's true, those are all good theories for the United States and if you know if graph after graph shows that adolescent mental health collapsed in 2012 2013, what about school shootings? city ​​shooting that was in 2012 kids have had lockdown drills, of course they are anxious, but why did girls start entering psychiatric WS in New Zealand at the same time and in Canada, the UK, Australia and Northern Europe?

Why was this a coordinated global response from teenagers? girls, especially younger teenage girls because of American school shootings or because of American inequality or whatever, that's when I really started to feel like, oh my God, this is gigantic, this isn't just an anomaly of the US social sciences that we can discuss. For decades this is happening in many countries, the increase in mental illness has not occurred. We still find no evidence of this in East Asia. East Asia is very different, but at least throughout the developing democratic and open Western society. That's true, that's true, one of the things I'm trying to better understand or make sense of is how do you square with another thing that we're seeing in Gen Z, which is a greater capacity for empathy, you're going to have to explain that, tell me what you mean. , Well I think. there's some understanding that this generation has become acclimated to mental health in a way that we weren't and there's a whole corner of Tik Tok that's just about mental health and they're learning about mental health at a younger age and there's a sense of sensitivity around that and how that works within the context of the statistics that you're seeing right.

So first, do you present this as a good thing? Is this a good thing? Oh, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know, I mean, if I'm honest, I guess I'd have a predisposition to think that would be good, right? Because you and I are from a time when there was a stigma around mental illness. My mother sent me to a psychotherapist. when I was in high school because I developed some tics and that was embarrassing since I didn't want to admit it to other kids, so there was a stigma around mental illness seeing a therapist, so you and I have the intuition, well, yeah let's decrease the stigma, that would be good and that's good, we don't want people to feel ashamed of who they are or the problems they face, so it's all good.

I think the stigma was more or less. It happened in 2010 like we really succeeded in destigmatizing therapy and mental illness in the early 2010s. I think what happened is not only that we removed the stigma but we reversed it. That's on Instagram and YouTube originally now on Tik Tok. these gigantic communities around all possible mental illnesses and what effect they have on children, is it good to give them more information or is it making them increasingly fragile and not very resilient? Well, that's true, because what happens because of the way the algorithms work, the ones that are presented are the most successful, the most successful are the most extreme, so if you have maybe a little bit of a tick ormaybe if you don't have it, there's actually a diagnosis, now there are these tick disorders. they're not really tourettes, but they look like tourettes, people actually think they have them, but they develop involuntary motor tics and in one of the best known examples they eclipsed the word beans because there was a British woman, Eevee, I don't know what.

She may have actually had Tourette's, I don't know, but she would scream the word beans and then all these girls would look at her and then they would scream the word, they developed similar things, like we were saying before, girls are more. open to influence from other girls that boys come from other boys, especially emotional influences, so immersing our children, especially high school girls, immersing our children in a community where illnesses are valued and mental health is a source of shame because you are somehow insensitive. oh, you think you're so happy when the rest of us are miserable?

I have heard this from some children. um so no I don't think Tik Tok and Instagram and all that stuff is good for the mental health of people who are suffering. mental health issues I think now we're seeing um about therapy, we're seeing about psychologization, uh, we're seeing valorization, we're seeing incredibly bad information spread, so no, I think this is a really, really bad thing, the social. what the media has done to the mental health community in terms of misinformation, like looking more broadly on the internet, we are seeing this increase in fragmentation, we no longer enjoy a monoculture by any means, yes there is misinformation out there and there is also an increase in contrarianism. idea that everything you've been told is a lie and this is what you don't want to know, so people walk around in all kinds of alternative realities about what's true and what's not, so my first question is What is this doing to our brain and then secondly the existential question like can we be coherent as a society as a democracy when we can't even agree on a shared sense of what is true and real?

That's true. I won't have much to say. about the first because, although I'm learning a lot about what social media and other things are doing to teen mental health and teen brains during puberty, I can't say exactly what our current information environment is doing. in the brains of adults, so I'm going to put that aside, it's attractive, it's attractive when you come across that post and it's like here's the secret, let's click on that and that's what you know that there is Internet traffic, that is what makes you know everything. compromise, yes, so I'll make two points up front: one is, we're a very tribal species, we love group on group conflict.

The great success of liberalism in the last hundreds of years, I would say, is to overcome traditional societies. cohesive around shared blood Shared gods shared enemies and liberal democracies have been able to cohere around a set of procedures and processes for legislating and resolving disputes that leave each of us free to build the lives we want to live and can live together in peace and harmony. with you with a lot of diversity, so all of that was really suppressing our tendency towards tribalism and I think once social media became super viral again in the early days, it was wonderful, it seemed like a friend of democracy, but once you get the like button, retweet button everything becomes a super dumb virus after 2009, this is now what leads to the fragmentation of everything you use the word monoculture before and I think a lot of your listeners would cringe like, mon , we don't want a monoculture, you know what we want. it's a rich culture with many small groups of communities and many different ethnic groups may have their own culture, but it goes against the background of a common American understanding, not perfect, but a sense that you know there was a choice and we had procedures and This person gained insight into what American history was like.

We always argue about the details, but there has to be some way to understand things together. When the 9/11 attacks happened, we quickly settled on the narrative that we were attacked by al-Qaeda and I thought that was obviously true, there were some conspiracy theories, but they didn't get very far because it was 2001, we had an Internet older one that wasn't perfectly suited for conspiracy theories. I mean, they flourished, but they didn't. Now it's just once things become super viral and super intimidating, especially Twitter, once people can attack anyone anytime, anywhere, an attack that could go viral and destroy the person's life. , people get scared, they don't talk as much and when you get the moderates Going Quiet you get what is called a spiral of silence there is a political scientist from West Germany in the 70s I have forgotten her name Elizabeth Noel Noyman I think it was she who actually wrote this article brilliant about, you know, looking at all the communist countries. just east of it, um, where when you attack the moderates on your side and they stay silent and all you hear is more extreme people, everyone gets the feeling that this is what public opinion is, oh, this is what people think and then once they understand that the new ones moderate the new people to the limit they are attacked and then they remain silent and that changes the perception even more to the extreme, so this is now happening on the left and in the right, so we see it.

I believe in the Republican Party, with the loss of all the moderates. There are almost no moderate Republicans left in Congress, um, and I think the party I think is drifting in many ways, we see that on the left, not so much in the Democratic Party, where the moderate wing actually generally wins over the republicans. More radical wing, but on the left, I think we see it in left-dominated institutions, which are mainly epistemic institutions, anything related to knowledge generation, universities, media journalism, art museums in all those areas, we see that almost all of them were on the left, but they were mostly true liberals, they believed mainly in freedom of speech, they believed in the

truth

, but once the moderates are attacked and silenced, now the people who speak are the people who are more extreme and say you know our goal is not knowledge, our goal is not to preserve the best of what has been thought and said, our goal is to achieve racial equality or divestment from Israel or whatever. that is, as some political objective and when you do that, then you are betraying the institution that you are betraying. the mission of the institution and of course the public loses trust, so I think what social media has done by silencing moderates by empowering extremists is destroying any ability for us to come to a common understanding of what that is happening and is undermining and I would say destroying the institutions that we depend on to find the truth I think we can solve the problem of children I don't know what we do for democracy where its optimism lies in the younger generation this is a very vision More pessimistic is one that I share and I think there is a possibility that there is a giant swath of the population that would fall into that moderate category, you just don't listen to them, they don't talk on social media and the idea is that they still show up and vote. and you know they still talk to their friends or whatever, but is that swath of the population shrinking and shrinking and getting smaller and smaller as the boundaries of what constitutes being some sort of moderate or centrist are pushed? define more finely? products of the 20th century where we think about public opinion and we think about the contraction of the medium and we think that an election is a measure of what the electorate thinks and therefore the goal should be to expand the number of people who think well manner. way, let's say, but since 2010 or so that's not the way things work, it's not about changing people or it's about the dynamics of who has the power to intimidate, so the medium I don't think that the average has been reduced in the United States if everyone's attitudes were to be measured, in fact, there is a debate about whether the United States is polarizing and people on the other side say no, we are not polarizing, look at the polls of public opinion people are still pretty moderate most Americans are still in the middle on most things or you know there's a bell shaped curve so if you look at the averages they don't change much, but in super viral social media, the world average doesn't matter, except on election day, it actually does matter what people think, but every other day of the year it doesn't really matter what people think, what matters is what's happening in this strange, distorting stage of things happening on social media, in which case many of the people who are screaming and shouting aren't even there.

Really, many of them are Russian agents or other foreign agents. Many of them are people with personality disorders, um, t

roll

s, you know, men who enjoy being blunt, um, so this is not at all a reflection of public opinion and yet it shapes almost everything that we make. do the right thing and, in turn, over time, it will shape public opinion. That's right, what's the impact on the younger generation who are trying to understand what they think and where they fall on that spectrum? And we're just at the beginning of the advent of AI and what that's going to do with this whole thing, so it's a very worrying situation, you know, like can the United States or liberal democratic institutions in general survive what are we seeing right now?

That's true, I think it's really an open question in a way that it wasn't before 2010, it just wasn't an open question, I mean, it's happening in other countries, not all the other ones, not all the other democracies. , some are not so polarized, but there are others, you know, Poland. Japan and Korea, I mean, there are a number of democracies that are experiencing more dysfunctional polarization, um, but not all except ours, since the particular problems were very large, very diverse, our first amendment, which is so wonderful in In many ways, it means we have almost no options to regulate.

I think we can regulate social media among adults for children, but there is very little we can do at the legislative level for adults and Democratic discourse. So I think we are very vulnerable and you know, I don't want to be too pessimistic because I have always been wrong in betting against the United States in the past doesn't mean I will always be wrong in the future. I am hopeful that people will realize that we cannot continue as we are and we are I will have to adapt to this new world. In fact, the title of my next book will be Life after Babel adapting to a world that we may never share again and one of the characteristics of this world will be that people really need it. to do their job they really need to put aside their politics if you are a librarian be a librarian don't try to incorporate your politics into what people can read if you are a university professor teach your subject don't bring in your views on this or that if you are a journalist Be a journalist, don't say that we are not going to support the other side, as many young journalists say, then we have a crisis of our institutions due to a true generalized lack. of professionalism because people think that what is good for me is to use my position to advance the party of the good MH and that is the way to ruin.

Yes, there is this dramatic erosion of trust in institutions in general, in journalism, in government, in higher education institutions, etc. How do we repair that trust? Yes, he agrees with what you just shared, but or is it more than that? I mean, unless we can do it, it becomes a very serious situation. I feel like we're just not there. on the precipice of that right now, given that degradation of trust, I feel like that's how I feel like we're on the precipice of something that could be very, very bad. I'll just give you my thoughts on the world I know best.

It is the university world where, in 2015, higher education in the United States had extraordinary support. We had one of the best brands in the world. American universities dominated all the lists of the best smart kids from around the world who wanted to come to America. to our best universities, so we had this incredible brand and at the heart of the brand was excellence and honesty. We can't lie. You know, people would say that a Harvard study showed X because you know Harvard is a well-known brand. Well, that means that. must be true, so that's what we had until 2015 and it wasn't perfect, it wasn't entirely true, but it was mostly true, as you know universes are big and diverse placeswhere many intelligent people are making many discoveries.

I love being a teacher. I love academia, but in 2015, because of social media, this is what I've been writing about in other works. Because of social media, we were invaded by people who were pursuing political agendas rather than academic agendas, not most people. away, but because the activists could intimidate, threaten and destroy our reputation, many of us stayed silent, we took over the purpose of the University, which is why I think trust in superiors plummeted after 2015. It all started in 2015 in that patio. I won't go into that, but in 2015 there were a lot of student protests, college presidents gave in, they never punished people for yelling at speakers, they never affirmed academic integrity, so that just fell apart and fell apart, and Gallup data shows that by June 20123 it wasn't just Republicans who hated higher education, it was moderates and centrists higher education, this incredible 2015 mark had somehow managed to alienate most of the country , our reputation was in the bathroom and all of that was before October 7 and before those congressional hearings.

We saw those three presidents who couldn't say why it was bad to say it was a complete disaster, so that's the world I know best, but the only optimistic thing I can say is that, although I have been, I have been studying this. and working and trying to fix it or help it since 2015 every year was worse than all the years before, there was never really any progress until 2023, things started to change in higher education. I co-founded an organization called Head do Academy. We are about 6 or 7000 people, mostly professors, who believe that we need diversity of views, open research, we need to do our work, we love our work, if there are any professors or university administrators listening, I urge you to join to this free heterodox academy. org, but what I'm saying is that the way America has traditionally worked is that we have problems that don't get fixed, they get worse and worse and then they get so bad and then something happens and we finally fix them and this is a the problem with democracies they do not look forward they do not do so they are not far-sighted authoritarian countries like China are very far-sighted they plan in advance five-year plans now they are not very dynamic and have a rigidity, you already know, although the trends now are very bad for the American political life, you should never assume that they are just going to continue, something is going to change and things might change, but your sense is that the pendulum has swung as far as it is going to swing and it is swinging.

Now, a little balance for, you know, if you had asked me this two years ago, I would have said: I don't think it's a pendulum. I think it's more like a tower. You know, a pendulum is a negative feedback loop where the further it goes, the stronger the force is that brings it back to the center, but a tower is a positive feedback loop where you push a tower a little bit, the more you push it, The stronger the force that pushes it, so I feared that universities and The kind of ideological revolution was more like a tower, there was no way to stop it, but now we are seeing some signs, maybe it is like a pendulum, which I think which is a very hopeful sign.

We've also seen it in The New magazine. The York Times finally stood up for itself and started saying, do you know what would happen if our reporter wrote something you didn't like? We are not going to fire them. Bad luck, we're journalists and they hadn't really done that from 2015 to 2023. but they started doing it, they really started to stand up. I think better in 2023, yes, we could spend several hours on what is happening in the media right now and the destruction of journalism and all that, we don't have the time bandwidth for that. but what I do want to talk about is this very interesting and unexpected chapter in the anxious generation, which is about something broader and existential that is happening in the midst of this crisis, which is spiritual degradation, a chapter that you would not expect to find in a book like this is atypical, so talk a little about what you want to say with this chapter and why you were convinced to include it.

I'm glad you noticed it's an unexpected chapter because I wasn't expecting to write it. I was hoping to write a short book about what social media was doing to girls and expand it into a larger book about what the whole digital environment is doing to teenagers and I was way behind schedule and told my editor I had it in mind. a certain date. I was really late, but when I got close to the end I felt good. I've laid out all this evidence about mental health and a couple of other things and kids, but I haven't touched on what it's doing to adults and everyone.

We are feeling it. I feel like we are all feeling fresh, fragmented, exhausted, overwhelmed. I wanted to say something for adults and what I realized when I made my list of worries, like what is it doing to us, affected a whole part of my mind since a long time ago, my first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding modern truth and ancient wisdom, and what I did was I collected psychological statements from the East and the West thousands of years ago and today you know things like there is nothing right or wrong, but thinking makes it so. from Hamlet, but there are similar things in Marcus Aurelius and Buddha, so I learned a lot from writing that book about ancient wisdom and what I realized is that what an online life does to us, what social media does to us online particular, is exactly the opposite of what the Ancients advised, so a simpler example is that many Traditions are wise about the fact that we are quick to judge, we are hypocrites, you know, don't judge so you won't be judged, right? why do you see this?

The speck in your neighbor's eye when you don't see the chart in yourself, all of which urges us to judge more slowly. Be less angry. Be more forgiving. That is spiritual wisdom and what an online life is. What is it? Do you know Twitter or any other you know? There are some platforms that have nice cultures, but for the most part kids are immersed in a culture of Instant Judging because if you don't judge now, someone will tell you why you haven't judged, you don't care about this topic. so it makes us very critical and makes us not care about the context, while in reality moral violations are moral concerns.

It is almost always really complicated, there is always a story, but social media eliminates it and makes us more critical. The Ancients advise us to calm and clear our minds because when people focus on their own worries, their small worries are not open to them. God or other people, so spiritual advancement comes from clearing away the dust, dirt and cobwebs, sitting in silence, learning to silence the jumping monkey in your mind. I think it's something that Buddhists say is hard to do, it takes practice, but if you do it. The rewards are incredible and the research on meditation is very, very good, very positive, what is an online life?

Quite the opposite, it's constant things coming in, constant notifications, constant interruptions and you're really focused on yourself. Should I intervene in this? What did people say about what I did? I chimed in on what's happening: my status goes up or down and I have a catalog. I think I have seven different things. Seven different topics in the book on how. This is what spiritual advancement is. This is what an online life is. It does and it is exactly the opposite. I say this from the point of view of an atheist. I am Jewish by ethnicity and culture.

I was never religious, but my research on morality led me to research religion because they are very closely related and all of that led me to study ancient knowledge. There is a lot of wisdom in these traditions and I think part of our modern world is that we are losing touch with everything that was said five minutes ago, we are losing our past. we are losing guidance, we are losing ballast, we are losing a lot of spiritual wisdom mhm, this is the most profound and important piece, I think in all of this, is this battle or this war between the ego and the advancement or the focus on the self versus the self-transcendence so you connect it's about you, how it's measured it's about what just happened, what's about to happen, it's the anticipation, what you know, the fear, it's that you know the role of the individual in terms of this Collective and this drives the binary.

Thinking that creates a lack of empathy undermines forgiveness - all of these things that we would all agree are laudable traits that should be cultivated at the cost of any investment in self-transcendence by understanding that all of the things we seek through displacement are actually the I found by unplugging and being present and starting to invest not only in the inner work of becoming more self-actualized, but also in understanding that you know it's not about yourself, it's about everything that's right, that's right, and I know that it's you. . Listeners are very interested in self-improvement and health and mental health, yes, I think this is a type of practice that is difficult, but you have to be aware of it, you have to commit to it and you have to change your habits to make space for any part of your day that you don't have, you don't have any guardrails up like these things just come in and take over that time, you made it as a dimension of yourself, are you focused on yourself or others focused I think which is a very important Dimension that is at the heart of spirituality and the spiritual Traditions are trying to move us along that Dimension and this is not just in the crisis of meaning and lack of purpose that many of us are suffering, yes, that's right, that makes it much, much more difficult, much worse. um, when we don't have a sense of purpose, a sense of noble purpose, we feel scattered and fragmented, we chase other things, we chase status, we chase material possessions.

Another way to think about this Dimension rather than just self and other is it's superior versus inferior and that's something I took from the happiness hypothesis that around the world you see many cultures talk about a vertical dimension of life, now there is a vertical Dimension as hierarchy and authority and the king is at the top and the vassals at the bottom, but what I found psychologically is that there is also another vertical dimension, so imagine a three-dimensional space, you know there is the x axis, the y axis is the vertical dimension, but then there is a z axis as if coming out of the page that I have called Divinity because many societies have the idea that God is above or high, he is up in the sky, he is good, he is Noble, and then the devil or demons are below. they are down they are in hell that is down we have a lot of embodied cognition about high, low and high also it is less carnal it is more ethereal it is more loving it is calmer and down is more carnal sensual biological lustful painful um and So, because of that you find this in many cultures, which really appeals to me, whenever I find something strange that's really ornate in multiple cultures, I start to think almost like Carl Young with archetype theory, like you know why these common patterns occur.

Everyone there must be something in our brains that is causing this to happen, so I think thinking in this three-dimensional space is the normal human way of thinking. Oh, and a lot of my thinking here was influenced by simply spending three months in India researching I know you're going to India very soon, so you know Hinduism is very explicit about some areas being purity zones, some being purity zones of pollution and there is a very explicit high and low sense in which we, moderns, live in a global world. that has been completely stripped of that third dimension, there is no Divinity, you just know that if you like it, do it, if it gives you pleasure, it's good, but I think people feel the loss because it's in our heads, so if not we do.

We talk about it and we are left wondering what this is that I feel, why I feel dissatisfied. I don't know how that influences the way you think about your specialty, which is moral psychology, this idea that the answers we have. Re searching and searching will not necessarily be found in reason and yes, in logic, but in our instincts and in our instinct, yes, doing this work in psychology on the psychological foundations that I have called the moral basis. Moral Foundations Theory has really changed the way I think about morality and politics and a good society and everything in the Western tradition.

There is a long tradition of trying to reason our way to morality as you know, the people of the Scientific Revolution are able to reason and use evidence to find the truth. the truth about the stars and about gravity and about plants and everything that people have tried to do this in the moral world in the social world Can we have a science of sociology and societies? Can we have a science of morality for hundreds of years? I have sought the science of morality. Can we prove what is right and what is wrong? I'm a type ofquite cerebral and rational person.

I should be really depressed about that, but what this research has led me to is the realization that our communities are emergent things. these sociological facts that make no logical sense but have a power of their own and we need them, we need them desperately, we need order and structure, we need a sense that there is a moral world, we need a sense that we live in the same world as other people , this is all a very irrational thing, but it's who we are, it's a human thing and, um, I think we're losing that sense of living in a shared moral matrix, it's very disorienting and, as Emil Durkheim demonstrated, 100 years ago in your book about suicide, when you have anomia or lack of norms, people don't feel free, they don't feel like I can do what I want here, they feel lost, they feel why something is worth doing, we're confused and that's when suicide rates go up at least in Western cultures that are in a sense almost too free, he was like, um, so yeah, doing this job certainly pushed me to a moral vision that's very different from the one I had when I was younger. . a little bit about the solutions to this cohesion problem, how do we know how to reach the other side of the aisle and develop better ways of communicating or simply being present with people who see the world differently?

I'm glad you put it as a cohesion problem because then I can address it since I've been getting more and more alarmed about American politics and democracy since 2008, when I started working on this, my first T-talk was about the left and the right and why they don't understand each other in 2008, I started to get more and more alarmed and the way I see it now, you know, think of this complex sculpture, this complex thing and you start turning it or you put a wheel on it, you know , or like a spin on the playground, you start spinning it and you spin it faster and faster, well, the parts go to fly the pieces will simply be thrown out by the centrifugal force and what we need is the corresponding centripetal force to remove them .

We have a great secular liberal democracy with a lot of diversity, it has many pieces, if we were a small and cohesive nation with one ethnicity and one religion we would not have this problem, we would be very cohesive, we would not have the creativity of diversity and vitality, but we would have much more cohesion and trust, and the Scandinavian countries used to be very small and homogeneous countries. Very high confidence. It's very easy to have a liberal democracy there, so I think what we have to do is think like Americans, okay, this is who we are, this gives us unique strengths, but man, we are.

If we're falling apart and we can't function, we have to restore some basic functions that institutions rely on, so if you think about it that way, what can we do within an American framework? And I think some things like emphasizing assimilation again, this is one of my most controversial points um, you can have diversity if you have assimilation and this is the America of the 20th century postwar world, you know, so, you know, my grandparents came from Eastern Europe, they were religious Jews, my parents were more secular, all of us. He had a very Jewish identity but we all had a very American identity and we are grateful to this country for allowing that to be possible so that immigration with assimilation does not arise.

He has many problems. People whose anest were here for a long time see people coming. but if people assimilate, they're basically saying, we love America, we're happy to be here, you know, you don't get the nativist pushback, that's when people started saying and this was it. I think a problem on the progressive left began to say no. assimilation that is cultural genocide people should not assimilate assimilation is bad people should keep their own cultures here we should assimilate to them and this is also happening in Europe and causing a huge right wing backlash, it is literally reviving Nazi affiliated parties in Europe, so Immigration is a gigantic problem today in the United States and Europe and I think the blame, you know, can be pointed to racism on the right, but to the anti-assimilationist vision of the left.

Mass immigration with low assimilation. I think that, very predictably, triggers the reaction of the right. here I'm drawing on political scientist Karen Stenner, a wonderful Australian political scientist, so anyway, if you think about any immigration issue in terms of how we create cohesion while still having our diversity, then I think we can move forward, another would be one gap. year after high school of some kind of national service giving kids a common experience moving them to different parts of the country a red blue exchange something like that, so there's a lot we can do to convey the sense that we are one country, our destinies are interlined we have to learn to get along we have common interests and common concerns uh that's the way to approach it yes and we have a lot to lose, we sure do if we don't really catch up with this, I think we're safe Have we given for granted this country and this country I think is a miracle?

I am very grateful. It is a miracle and it is in danger of falling apart. I want to change the subject and talk a little about parenting. of parents listening to this I'm a parent, you're a parent, you've shared some things about how to change our relationship with our devices, how to advise our kids to have a better relationship with these devices, and I'm laughing because we all know how hard it is this and practicality, okay, just tell your child this or that or these are the rules, like this, well, good luck with that, you know what I mean, putting this in place is a big challenge and we as adults we have our own challenges with our compulsive behavior with these phones, children pay attention to what we do not what we say, what is the advice for parents who have a child who you know is not eight years old, yes, 15 or 16 like the The boat is already taken out and you can see what is happening in front of you and there is a feeling of helplessness like you can't start it because you know it's already been done right, so yes, I'm sure you have parents who ask that .

You talk about this all the time absolutely absolutely so it is, so you know, the central idea of ​​the book is that we're all caught up in collective action problems and if you tell your kid, you know you've been on Instagram for years. I'm canceling your account. You've had a smartphone for years. I'm giving you a flip phone. Okay, I'm not warning that some parents want to do that, but my recommendation would be that you don't do it if you're the only one, but if you can find several other parents of your children's friends, not necessarily to go that far, but do Whatever you do, if your child feels that he is alone, he is the only one, then it will be very scary for him and he will resist with all his might and will see you as a tyrant who is separating him from his friends.

What I hope to do with this book is create such a broad understanding that this is really harming our children, which is a sight children share so that we don't have to convince them that it may be possible for parents of 15-year-olds to say you know what you know I gave you a smartphone too soon I wish we hadn't given it to you in fifth grade you have it now I'm not going to take it away from you but we're going to have a house rule which is when you come in you have to put your phone in this box and you get it when you go out, a smartphone is very useful when you're out, you don't have it when you're in the apartment or the house, now you still have your computer, so yes, you can text, you can still text to your friends.

I'm not saying don't text your friends, but I am saying that the smartphone is unusually addictive because of the touchscreen technology and small screen. Let's have some limits. This is what we do with my daughter, who is 14 years old and has a smartphone. There are no social networks. media and when she's at home we don't apply it perfectly, but when she's at home she's supposed to be at the kitchen counter charging and she can use her computer, she can text her friends, that's the next thing what we have to work on. but it's so much better than just spending all day staring at her palm dinner.

Could we have a very strict rule? My wife really enforces it. You know, it's so natural that you're having a conversation like, Oh, what was her name? Let me see. No, no, no, you can't take out your phone during dinner. I'm not saying take your child out again. Some may want to do it, that might be the right thing to do, but it's very, very difficult. I'm saying at least set boundaries that aren't on it all the time. The most effective thing you could do to help your child would be to encourage the children's school to stop using the phone, since children don't really have the ability to do so.

Say you know what this is bad for me. I'm not going to do it, since it's very, very difficult to do even for an adult. But if this school stops having phone calls, then everyone will do it and then everyone will talk to everyone. It's a lot friendlier, the feeling of inclusion improves when schools don't have phones, so I would say be a social psychologist about it, try to get the school to improve the environment and try to work with some other families to get your child Don't feel singled out and alone on the topic of collective action and what your opinion is on where tech companies are right now.

I know you've spoken to Mark Zuckerberg and they may tell you one thing and do another. I don't know, but do you think there's hope for some version of reform here, well, you know, I guess I mean meta hasn't shown any inclination to reform despite receiving whistleblower reports or internal reports. I must say that regarding dangers and threats, no one set out to harm children. um, I think some of these leaders. they can still believe they might believe, you know, the skeptics, there are some professors that I'm in a debate with, so Mark Zuckerberg points to his work every time, on the Senate dais, he points to the work saying well, the scientific consensus.

It's just like the cigarette thing, yeah, exactly, that's true, that's true, because there are some conflicting studies that he can point to, but I don't know if he thinks it's harmless or not. I don't know, but my feeling is that because they are. caught in a collective action problem, whichever one of them does the right thing will lose all their underage users. A lot of users are under 13 and any company that does the right thing leaves, they have to kick them out and then they're just going to turn to Tik Tok and other companies that won't do the right thing, so I don't see any hope for reform for part of social media or gaming companies until they are forced by legislation or lawsuits.

I hope Congress stupidly gives them immunity from lawsuits for what they post back in 1997 or six when the Communications Decency Act was passed so we can't sue them for what they show our children, but those laws have been interpreted the way I have. I understand. very broadly, so parents can't really sue even over design choices that platforms made like stripes, for example, there's no reason for stripes, that's not a First Amendment issue, it's a trick they did to addict our children and parents still haven't been able to do it. sue, but there are a large number of cases in the process of refining the legal theory of why these platforms should be responsible for harming children, or at least keeping them away, so if these lawsuits are successful, they will be much larger than the agreement on tobacco.

There are many more children, many more people than tobacco ever affected. So you know, these lawsuits could be gigantic and that would have an effect on Congress. There is the online safety law for children. There is a law that does not slow down social networks. which is the most important thing, but it makes your time online less toxic, it sets more things to private, it makes it harder for men to contact girls and, you know, little boys, it does a lot of good things, so that it is necessary to approve kosa and that. It's bipartisan and that's actually an encouraging sign is that almost all of this is totally bipartisan there's no left right a thing that talks about cohesion like this could be the only thing that saves America no you're right it's true yes we need a common enemy. we, together, social media can be the common enemy that brings us together, the irony of that, that's right, that's right, what's unraveling us, will actually come back and bring us together again, like you can get into these app companies . whether it's Instagram or Tik Tok, what are the worst streaks that you talked about with Snapchat, which are the ones that you think are doing the most harm, especially to young girls, and if you could unpack some of the features of these apps, like which would be the ones you would like to see go first is the like button is the algorithm the follower count where is the damagelike where the location of the damage is specifically the total tonnage of the damage will be a function of the total hour spent times the harmfulness of those hours, so Tik Tok is the platform that absorbs the most time, but when you compare it to Netflix, it is exponentially more on Tik Tok, right?

I don't know for sure for teenagers, I imagine they are spending more. time on Tik Toto and I don't know that number, obviously adults spend more time on Netflix than Tik Tok, so I don't know the numbers, it's the number of hours, so Netflix has a lot of hours multiplied by mercy , very, very low. expensive for Netflix, while Tik Tok has a large number of hours and the most expensive. I mean, you know, hardcore porn, there are other things that are worse, but I think Tik Tok is the worst of the worst, it's the short videos, this is what I did.

I don't know this from the book, but I've been seeing it ever since when talking to my students. It is the short form that makes you enter this narcotic state. It's like a slot machine. You know, slot machine addicts fall into this state. They tell me they zone out, they go into a weird state, uh, where their worry, their anxiety disappears, it's like a hole they're in, so the short, steady videos do that, like slot machines, so I think that Tik Tok is the worst of the worst Instagram reels and you know, YouTube shorts. I can't say they aren't that bad, but the damage volume isn't that high, so that's the worst Instagram.

I think it was the worst for the girls because of the incredible amount of social media. compared to other girls, perfect lives carefully edited and put through filters, uh, so those are the two that I think have done the most harm to girls and then you know that video games are harming children, but it's not that the game is harming them, it is more the opportunity cost, taking them out of life and the things they do not do, the most important thing I think we could do is not play with algorithms, not play with similar buttons, it is simply delay, letting kids go through early puberty, that's what we have. to do early puberty and even the skeptics, even the people I debate with, there is a group in Britain, even they found out that they have a publication that shows that at least the correlation between the damage and the use of social media is older between 11 and 13 years for girls like even them.

I find it like this, can't we all agree that the current age of 13, which is too low, can't we all at least agree that it should apply, like why are there 10 year olds on PornHub, for example? What are they 11 years old? In the old case, we agree that the only people who disagree are the tech companies who would have to install those firewalls to prevent younger people from logging in, that's right, that's right, so how do you strengthen that? I think that's where I think we need to push Congress to enforce, which is why Congress passed the Online Privacy Shield Act in 1998.

I think they set the age at 13; the original bill was going to be 16, but lobbyists got it rejected. at 13 it was not about safety but about at what age a child can give information without the knowledge or consent of her parents. At what age can I, as a child, tell this company all my likes, hopes and fears and can they make the decision? data that can sell data that can market me, you know? Do parents have any control over this? And Congress said 16 would be the age and then it was lowered to 13. Oh, and there won't be any enforcement as long as the company doesn't do it.

They don't know you're under 13, they're fine, so they're really motivated to not know MH, this is crazy, this is completely crazy, it's like saying the drinking age is 18, but you know what's coming to them parents to enforce. and bars, strip clubs, brothels, whatever you know, we can't expect you to check IDs, it's up to the parents to keep their kids out, that's crazy, but that's where we are so we need to pressure Congress so that it really does its job and solves. class action issues and provide minimal regulation to the industry that is causing the most harm to our children rather than giving the industry itself blanket immunity from lawsuits.

I mean, this is the absurd situation we find ourselves in, so my hope is that we put pressure on Congress and this year there might actually be some action, except that, as you know, Congress always lets us down on these issues, unless the States are adopting it now, obviously a state-level solution is not optimal, but some states except Utah and Florida. They are taking the lead in creating environments where parents can raise their children and have a minimal degree of control over what children do online. How is it seen internationally? Who is doing this right? Britain is really leading.

They have a functioning legislature, something we don't have, so they have a parliament that passed some laws, they passed an age-appropriate design code. There is a wonderful woman, Biban Kidron, in the House of Lords, who has really led activism for children's rights and child safety. online, so Britain is leading, the EU is doing some things, but the EU tends to be very clumsy and overly regulated, so I don't know if they are going to produce good legislation. I think the British are doing a great job. and here's the thing when Britain passed this age-appropriate design quote several years ago.

I can't remember what the exact provisions are where certain things have to be set to private and there can be limits, oh yes there are limits on the time. of the day, the company can ping the kids you know, Google and Facebook, then they implemented these changes globally because it's a pain for them to have separate rules in different countries, so if Britain and Australia can take the lead here and prove it. It is possible, I think the United States will find it easier to follow suit. If you find regions or governments that are more responsive and more agile in putting policies into action, it will inevitably be right, obviously right, and obviously the money that Facebook is spending on supporting the people in Congress and in lobbying here is dwarfing what they spend overseas and they know they simply can't influence Britain Australia in the same way they can influence the US Congress.

What I love about this book is that it's just one piece in what is actually a broader movement. Like you go to the eager website Generation.com. I don't know who created that website, but they did a brilliant job. Township, oh my gosh, wonderful. I think it's called Township, it's a small operation, but doing beautiful work, yeah, yeah, it's very compelling and it's kind of a story that tells the thesis of why this is important and how to really understand it visually and then there's all this piece of art, I mean, we started out talking about these billboards, but you have We have all kinds of really interesting things in the world that it's like they seep into our Consciousness as people walk through our urban center, so how did it come together that and we talked a little bit about how you're extending the message of the book Into You Know live action yeah oh thank you for the opportunity so this came about because I'm friends with a brilliant artist in New York City named Dave cicerelli um who He came to see me because he liked what I was doing at heterodox.

Academy, he volunteered to help. He was putting together this John Stewart Mill book, uh, uh, chapter 2 on Liberty. It's amazing writing, but it's a little dense. I said, Dave, can you illustrate his metaphors? and Dave created these great drawings, and so on online. I can find that on Amazon a Kindle version um it's called everything but one it's John Stewart Mill Illustrated so it was a great collaboration with a brilliant artist who was likeIn 2018 or so I started looking on social media and I talk to Dave and I said to Dave, could we come up with some images that we would like to place on the subway as provocative images to dramatize what is happening here?

All these great ideas I said great, I'll see if I can raise some money, maybe we can do this, this is like 2019 and I couldn't raise the money and I was busy and we just fell through. So I write this book and here we are in 2023, Penguin Press has their art department creating covers and they're boring and they're kind of pedestrian and they're these covers, so yeah, that's real. artist who took who took that photo, so I said uh to Dave, I said hey Dave, I'm really stuck here, could you do better? and he said of course he would love it, so he came up with this beautiful design and it has this feeling. of opilia floating in the river like you're drowning and it has like all these yellow balls that look happy, but it's actually very threatening because I said I want conflict, I want beauty and conflicting emotions for me, that's great art, um, so he did it. and that's the beautiful cover and then the cover is so powerful.

I remember how it started, but we were like, hey, remember those signs, like why don't we do it, let's do it, uh, and then Dave came up with this whole plan with billboards and signs on the back of the buses and these provocative signs and stencils that were put up in the playgrounds when the adults took a step back, the children took a step forward, something simple: let your children have more freedom and that's why we've done this, Dave, he built this 10 foot tall milk carton, um, that says on the side, uh, you know, missing, uh, childhood, instead of, you know, it has the photo of the girl, it's that in front of the capital there is a photo of part of the capital, yes, it was in the National.

Mall last week, you know, with a team trying to get people talking about it and there's a lot of young people taking pictures for Instagram, which is cool, so he was in Washington and then he moved it to New York City . I joined. He was there last week and then he was in San Francisco, uh, like yesterday, he might even be there today. Go to eagerGeneration.com. You can see the page about the art, but it's in San Francisco and then it's coming to Los Angeles. Once we need to raise more money to bring it, but we will bring it to Los Angeles and then maybe other cities as well, so if anyone wants to support this art project, let me know and there will be billboards and posters and these.

Sort of you know, like when you walk through New York City, where it says don't post invoices and there are invoices everywhere and it's like there's a bunch of them in a row of a young girl in a space suit saying, send me to Mars. , Yeah. which is provocative because you say, I don't know what that means, it's asking you to dig a little deeper, so maybe explain that idea, so, the idea, so, the idea, so I'm an intuitionist in my my my academic research. I'm best known for moral foundations theory which holds that we don't really arrive at moral views because we reason our way, it's that we have a hunch and then look for reasons, so if I'm trying to persuade people not only I'm going to give the evidence, the arguments, that's what I do in the book, but you also have to give them the right gut feeling, so art can do that and dramatic images can do that. great television or great movies can do that, you know, and there are many moments in history where a great book changed the course of history, you know, you know Uncle Tom's Cabin or your Harri beer.

He keeps there all kinds of cases in which some literary work attracted people. feel something, so that's what we're trying to do with the art project and with the book, um, and some of the images, one of them composed by Lenor ski, who wrote Freer Range Kids, she works with us, It says like you know, supervision is love and it seems like a big brother thing, it's dystopian from 1984 because the way we raise our kids is like straight from 1984. I mean, this crazy paranoia that Dave has created, these are beautiful. They're beautiful and also a little shocking, so we're trying to illustrate the metaphors and tap into people's gut feelings.

If we simply manipulate gut feelings, I think it would not be honest, that would not be, it would be like a demagogue, but since I believe that I know Marshall, all the evidence of the research is in the book, but I also have God, that's why too We are doing the art project, but it is a leader. I didn't want to start a movement. I'm very busy. I'm an academic, I don't want to run anything, but wherever I go, whatever we do, people come up and say, Can I help? I hate what's happening. I hate what this did to my son.

I hate what this is doing to kids today. So if you're listening to this, if you want to be a part of the movement just to get started, just go to eager Generation.com, sc

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down the main web page that tells the story, like it's just describing, it narrates to you. At the bottom, we have a place whereYou can enter your email address and we will keep you informed. I don't have a 501c3. I have no way to do it. I think you might like it too. Download a pdf as if there are also useful tools for parents.

Yes, thanks. Yes it's correct. If you go to the resources page you will find that we have many tools for parents, teachers and schools if you want to encourage your children to go to school. To be able to call for free we have a petition or a letter that you can send to yourself, just copy that text, you can modify it yourself and send it, so we want to make it easy for parents, especially, to escape from these collective action problems to coordinate with each other and There are a lot of groups, we have a list of like 30 groups that are helping people do that, like wait until the 8th.

We have resources for parents. We have a lot of additional research, so there are a lot of resources there. I hope people go to the anxious generation. .com, so instead of waiting for collective action at the highest level, organize your own collective action in your local community, it is best to start with a few families because almost all parents are already in a text thread with parents of three other kids who had a play that once like that we're all, you know, usually we're all connected in small groups, you can start in small groups, all you need is three or four families and suddenly you have a group of kids who are playing with each other after school. instead of sitting and scrolling all day and then not feeling left out, so to end this on an optimistic note, your analogy is kind of like the Berlin Wall, like it's about to burst, it's not.

This incremental thing where we're going to sit there waiting forever there's enough energy behind it to know that the dam is going to burst soon and then everything changes exactly, there's what's called preference falsification, there are situations where if people only support something because they are afraid to speak out or if fear keeps them in place as soon as fear hits everything can change very very quickly and that happened in Eastern Europe, everyone hated communism. I traveled there in 1987. I don't think there were many communists or anything else back then, like everyone hated it but the secret police just kept them in their place, they were afraid and once it became clear that you actually know if everyone We gathered against the wall and tried to tear it down. we won and then it fell everywhere, that's a little too dramatic for what we're talking about here, but the social dynamics are actually very similar because why do we all give our kids phones at such a young age? age because we are afraid that they will then be left out and they are afraid of being excluded, so isn't the fear of the secret police the most powerful human impulse, that's right, yes, I mean being afraid of the secret police and being kidnapped at night and torture that is quite primitive too okay, I won't say it, but it is the same path, right, we want to be members with good reputation of a group, we are terrified of being isolated, of being isolated, of being alone, that's why the banishment .

It used to be a punishment in the ancient world before there were good prisons and things like your punishment is to be banished, we're not going to kill you, we're just going to send you away and that's like death, social death and Teenagers are actually very vulnerable to social death, so anyway my point is that if the kids themselves say yes, I'd like to get out if everyone else is doing well, then why don't you get off because everyone else , if the system stays in place? afraid of missing out and we can all go out together so the kids don't miss out we give them their childhood back we give them back the game we give them back to each other well said the book is deep there is a reason why you are everything everywhere everyone Right away , this has really struck a chord and is the only thing we can all agree on, I think except for a few small objections in nature, few other people, that is normal, that is good and I want to thank you publicly for putting the work to do something like this is a great Public Service and I am at your service if there is anything I can do to help you or to help this Mission so I appreciate you coming here today and sharing oh thank you so much for thank you . for giving me the opportunity to talk to your audience, you know, and thank you for bringing me in and posing, you know, posing the Devil's Advocate questions, you know that's how we learn and that's how we explore the complexity of the topic, so thank you. for the book. it's the anxious generation, you can go to anxious generation.com and you can go to Jonathan's substack at after babble.com, cool man, come back and talk to me again sometime.

I would love to thank you peace thank you okay okay man. That's all for today, thanks for listening. I really hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today. Visit the episode page at Rich roll.com, where you can find the full

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archive, as well as podcast merch, my books Finding Ultra Expressing the Shift in Plant Energy Form, as well as the Plant Energy in Meals Meal Planner . rich.com, if you want to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review or comment supporting the sponsors who support the show.

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