Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the anxiety generation)

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation) is a social psychologist, professor, and best-selling author. Jonathan joins the Armchair Expert to discuss why his moral dumbfoundings are such tasty party tricks, if disgust contains wisdom about borders that one shouldn’t cross, and how the overprotectiveness epidemic was borne out of the safest generation yet. Jonathan and Dax talk about the fact that despite public response it’s much more dangerous for kids online than it is in the real world, the cost of gamifiying a child’s education being that their brain becomes desensitized to dopamine release, and that more serious than mental illness issues as a result of excessive screens for kids is actually attention fragmentation. Jonathan explains the four harms of increased access to smart phones and tablets, how the prevalence of a side that silences its dissidents is a reliable predictor of its wrongness, and that the key is give your kids a great and exciting social childhood.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Mrs. Mouse. Hi.

Today we have Jonathan Height returning. I don't know if you guys would remember. I want to say that's like first year. It was early. It was early. Yep. And this one was really fun. I don't know about you.

Were you nervous the first time we had him? Yeah. Yeah. Well, cause we had first heard him on Sam Harris's podcast. He was our introduction to podcasts. Jedidiah Jenkins recommended I listen to the Jonathan Haidt Sam Harris episode. And I was so stimulated intellectually.

I'm like, oh my God, these two people know so much more about the world than I do. Really intimidating. So when we talked to him, I was scared the first time. This time was much more chill. Yeah, it was fun. Jonathan Haidt, I'm sure you've seen, he's been on an incredible press tour

for his current book, The Anxious Generation, but you would have probably become aware of him with The Coddling of the American Mind or The Righteous Mind or The Happiness Hypothesis. He is a New York, NYU professor, social psychologist and bestselling author. And this is a barn burner. Yeah, it's fun.

I love this one. Yeah, and The Anguished Generation is on everybody's book list. It's a very hot topic. So it's cool that he got to come in and tell us about it. I enjoyed it immensely. Please enjoy Jonathan Hyche. We are supported by Squarespace.

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He's an armchair expert. He's an armchair expert. He's an armchair expert. It's been many, many years since we first had you on. It was 2018 after my previous book, The Calling of the American Mind. Yes. New days for us then. Yes, seven years ago.

We started in 2018. Hopefully we've gotten 4% better. You can score us afterwards. 4% per year compounded. That's okay. If you have forgotten, I'll give you the same compliments that we probably did the first time, which is I think we were exposed to you first on Sam Harris 11 years ago, maybe 10 years ago.

In fact, that's the introductory episode I used to send people when I used to encourage people to listen to that show. It was such an invigorating debate. Yeah, it was one of my best conversations ever. Because we're sort of similar to each other in a lot of ways, but then we had this fight and then we buried the hatchet.

Yes! If you're ever going to model great discourse, similar to each other in a lot of ways, but then we had this like fight and then we buried the hatchet. Yes. If you're ever going to model great discourse, it's really encouraging to hear two smart people argue, not have the same opinion, represent themselves well. Yeah, I was just kind of enamored with your intellect and your ability to communicate what you think. It's pretty unique. And then over the years, I doubt this would get to you, but Monica and I bring up your moral thought experiments.

Oh, okay. A lot. So much, they're so tasty. What are they called? They're called? Moral dumbfounding. Dumbfounding, that's the word, okay. They're fun, they're good party tricks. Yeah, do you have a favorite? Cause we have a favorite.

So there's the brother sister incest story. Yeah, we love those. They're solid. Yeah. And then there's the eating your pet dog story. Those there's the brother-sister incest story. Yeah, we love those. They're solid. Yeah. And then there's the eating your pet dog story. Those are really the two that are- Tell us that one. Oh, okay.

So the background here is that I was studying moral psychology as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. And the big debate was, is moral judgment driven by gut feelings, which the philosopher David Hume had said long ago and which I was leaning towards, or is it driven more by reasoning

about the facts of the matter, especially about harm, as Lawrence Kohlberg was the dominant researcher at the time. And since I'd been studying how morality varies across cultures, it just seemed like morality is about the body. And I ended up doing some research in India and reading a lot about Hinduism. I'd always been interested in Hinduism.

I'd always been interested in travel. And it just seemed like American or Western morality was just much more cerebral and divorced from the body. I wanted to make up a bunch of stories that would hit you in the gut immediately. And then you'd reach for evidence of harm and it's not there. What do you do? Yeah. And so the first story I made up, a family's dog was killed by a car in front of their

house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious. So they cut up the dog's body and they cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this. What do you think? Was it okay for them to eat their dog? Let me just first ask you, what's your first reaction, Monica?

I mean, yes, of course, no, that's horrific. You're void of any form of humanity, feelings. You must be a sociopath. But then... Yes, keep going, then what? But then... Continue. I guess, although just because it tastes good...

I love that detail. The genius of these things is these really tiny details. And I'm upset you didn't go into film and television. I feel like you might have an M.I.C.C. show on. You still could. Kind of bent to you. Maybe a show like The Good Place. I could have advised on that.

Maybe you could advise. We could. I could've advised on that. Maybe you could've advised. We could maybe hook you up with that guy. Because if you had said they heard it was good for them, that would actually make it much more palatable. Wait, are you saying that if it was healthy? Right. As opposed to enjoyable?

Superfood. Superfood, that would've, no, why would that? Because to me that's different in like, oh they might need. One's pleasure seeking, one's sustenance seeking. Exactly, exactly. Oh, I see, I see. It's actually perfect that they just want

to try the taste of it. Can I just add, I don't care. You don't care if they eat their dog? Not at all, it's dead. Had they murdered the dog to eat it, now we're in a different zone. They've created suffering potentially, whatever. It's already dead, it's gonna be wasted.

I'll tell you what people around the world say. Almost everybody says it's wrong to eat your dog because it's like family, you have a relationship. The only exception is highly educated Westerners who do have a more harm-based morality and who do say, well, you know, it was their dog, they have a right to do it. Causing suffering, that would be terrible,

but the dog's already dead. One person said in my study, well, I guess in a way it's recycling, and so that's good. Sustainability. Yeah Sustainable dog farming. So the point is around the world, most people think that if you're revolted by something that disgust contains some knowledge, some wisdom about borders where you shouldn't cross. Except for educated Westerners, especially those on the left.

They have a much narrower morality based primarily around harm, especially protection of the vulnerable. So, okay, now I'll give you the more advanced one. There's a guy who's a vegetarian for moral reasons. He thinks it's wrong to kill animals. He works at a hospital in a pathology lab where they prepare cadavers for dissection. One day, there's a fresh corpse which recently died, good condition, but they have no need for it, so he's supposed to put it in the incinerator. He decides that he'd like to try meat, so he cuts off a section of the thigh

and disposed of the rest of the body and brings that section home and cooks it and eats it. Nobody sees him do this. What do you think, Monica? What do you think about that one? You know what's crazy? This is not hypothetical. What?

There was a cannibal in France. We used to have a conspiracy theory show and our fellow host interviewed this cannibal and he made the cannibals cookbook and it was the exact thing. He worked in a pathology lab. Oh my God. And he actually took it home and cooked it.

Wow. So it's not even hypothetical. Wow, the world is so weird. He went to jail, but he didn't do a ton of jail time for it. And he was able to get out and write this cookbook. I guess if you go to jail and you're completely broke and you have this amazing story, it's a pretty clever way to monetize it. France voted, able to get out and write this cookbook. I guess if you go to jail and you're completely broke and you have this amazing story, it's a pretty clever way to monetize it. France voted, so we know where they landed.

I think it's less amoral to do that than eat the dog. Because of the relationship. Oh, because you didn't have the relationship with the stranger. Yeah. So I'm going to guess that you're on the left politically. I am. Yeah. Okay. Good guess. There's a line from the philosopher Leon Cass, a really brilliant writer on matters of ethics. But he has a line, shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.

I spent a year at Princeton in 2007 to eight. It was a really wonderful year. And Cass came and he gave a set of lectures. He considers himself a sort of liberal from the old days. And he feels that things have moved so that he's now on the right. But he is more on sort of the right philosophically. And Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher

who is more on the left, he's brilliant, utilitarian philosopher. I love both men. One of the greatest days of my academic life was Casper's giving three talks on three days, and there was a lunch at the faculty club, and I was visiting as a scholar, and so there's a bunch of us around,

and it was like Singer on one side, cast on the other, these two men with completely opposed worldviews. So singer would say, it's fine on any of these if you're not harming anyone, that's all there is is harm to sentient creatures, including animals. So I think you're more on the singer side. And cast is more beloved by say Catholic intellectuals or those who are theorizing about, well,

why shouldn't gay people marry? Or there's a lot more than just so. There's other metrics other than suffering. Yes, that's right. Right. Like humanity. Like maybe a higher calling or a higher truth you're pursuing.

If it's in a religious context, it makes sense. If you believe as most religions do that we are children of God, we are created by God, we carry some essence inside of us, whether you're Christian or Hindu or Jewish, there's a sense that your body is either on loan or a gift from God. And so you shouldn't act in ways that defile it.

Right. Or eat it, God's child. Exactly. God's child. That's right. Treating it like just a piece of meat is defiling it. So if you're in a religious context, it makes perfect sense.

And if you're an atheist or secular, it doesn't. And I asked Cass, I was able to talk to him afterwards alone. I said, so do you believe in God? And he said, what depends what you mean? You know, as many Jewish intellectuals do, I'm not Jewish. I was like, well. Rabbinical response. That's right.

And once I made a call, like, do you believe that there's an intelligence and essence or something that created us? And he said, oh no, not in that sense, no. Yeah. Right. So he got to that position from really what I think is a humanitarian view, which I'm kind of coming to in this age of internet degradation.

Actually, I hope we'll talk about that, the degradation of our digital lives. Yeah. But it's such an interesting area where ethics is meeting up with the craziness of what's happening to our lives now that it's all going online. What do you think about just the appeal of one answer,

a binary, and I just have found now that in interviewing all going online. What do you think about just the appeal of one answer, a binary? And I just have found now that in interviewing so many people and living long enough, at best things are like 61% true. And as they say, there's two kinds of people. Those who think there's two kinds of people know two don't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say that in general, as a heuristic in life, what you're saying is good and right. But sometimes there are true binaries

and sometimes one side is completely right. So just to give you an example, with my new book, The Anxious Generation, I'm engaged in a debate with people about what caused the gigantic increase in mental illness that began with young people around 2012. It's very sudden. And it happens in many, many countries.

And in general, as a social scientist, I favor the view that, well, you know, it's multi causal, and there's all these different factors coming in and oh, we never want to point to one thing. Sometimes there is one thing I mean, like leaded gas did some terrible stuff to developing brains. Sometimes there are childhood diseases. And sometimes there is one thing that causes a lot of smoking is pretty definitive. We get them occasionally. Yeah, we do.

That's right. That's right. Have you found though, really quick, as you've gotten older, because certainly I'm clocking the fact that as I get older, I am getting more conservative. Yep, that happens. Tell me what you mean by that and what way are you getting more conservative? I'm starting to question a lot of the assumptions I made.

Like decriminalizing drug use would be great. And then I see the result in Oregon and I go, well, that didn't work out. ODs went up. Our approach to homelessness here in LA, that was unsuccessful. We have to acknowledge it's unsuccessful. They seem very objectively and empirically true,

but if I just plot them all on a graph, I would have to recognize, oh, isn't it suspicious that you've also gotten older? So how does one correct for this natural thing and maybe one shouldn't and that's the nature of life. I have a bunch of thoughts. First, it's long been observed that that is generally the case.

I think it was Winston Churchill said, any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart. Any man who's still a socialist at age 30 has no head. Something like that. Yeah, yeah. And there is research showing that there's certain life experiences that push people to the right. Having children is the main one,

because once you have children, you see more threats in the world, you're more protective, and you have sort of a longer time horizon. Owning a business, when you become a business person, suddenly you see like, wait a second, it's impossible for me to operate my business, all these regulations.

You're two for two. And then also, I don't know about you, but I'm finding I'm just much less passionate than I used to be. And this is also true just about ageing, you know, your hormone levels drop, especially for me, your testosterone level drops. You're not out winning a mate, that period's over. That's right, through different periods of life.

And I feel like I'm much more stoic. I read a lot of stoic writing. So I can think about things on all sides. Oh, and then there's another factor, which is I have this pet theory that you can't know which side is right perfectly, but you can bet. Without knowing anything about the topic, I could have a successful betting record on, you give me the disputes, I'll make bets on them.

All I need to know is which side does a better job of suppressing and attacking and threatening its dissidents. If you tell me which side does not allow anyone to question, I can say that side is wrong about most things. What I talked to you about last time, the coddling the American mind, was about this weird thing that happened on college campuses beginning 2015, but it actually goes back more to 2012, 2013. It's now called the Great Awakening.

And so there was this period, I think it really runs from say 2015 when things got crazy on campus, through 2020, that whole crazy year. And it's kind of ending now, but there was a period when the left was extraordinarily good at destroying socially anyone who questioned. And that led to terrible policies like the ones you just mentioned. When you're not open to any criticism.

You become structurally stupid. You have a group of people, they can be brilliant as individuals, but they don't have the normal process of someone saying, hey, let's decriminalize marijuana. Someone says, well, wait, what would happen if you lose that process? Then you become structurally stupid. Obviously, the right is insane as well.

I'm not saying they're smarter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there was a period where the left dominated cultural institutions put in policies that really backfired. And I believe that's why so many groups moved to the right, moved towards Trump. The Liberal Party became a little illiberal in the way they welcomed the scrutiny. But do you think it's the majority of the party

or is it still fringe? Well, what matters is what people see. And so since on both sides, the fringe control, this is what's so upsetting about our politics. The right is not conservative, the left is not liberal. At the center of our discussion here, and especially as we move to the anxious generation, It's upsetting about our politics. The right is not conservative, the left is not liberal. At the center of our discussion here, and especially as we move to the anxious generation,

when you get a change in technology, you get a change in so many aspects of life. When you get television and automobiles, great inventions, but it ends up changing the way we live together because now you're just in your home watching your entertainment center, and you get in your car and you go somewhere else. And so it decimated human interaction and neighborhoods.

But that was over many, many decades. The move onto smartphones and social media, what I call in the book, the great rewiring of childhood. 2010, teens have flip phones. They might have Facebook, but they don't use it very often because they have to use their parents' computer to get on it. There's no privacy, that's right.

Whereas by 2015, everyone has a smartphone, social media, Instagram, high speed internet, limitless texting. So when you change radically how people are connected, you get massive changes throughout society. That new information environment is kind of what allowed the illiberal elements of the left to dominate and intimidate and harass anyone who dissented. And it ended up doing terrible damage to the left.

The fact that we have Donald Trump in power saying things like, the laws shouldn't apply to me if I'm trying to save our country. I mean, this is complete madness. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's complicated, but on the coddling of the American mind

and what you were exposing in that. Now, here's what I want to own. So part of the reason I was loving listening to you on Sam Harris, and why I was enjoying Sam Harris so much at that time was, I'm going to say I had succumbed to a bit of a moral panic about colleges. There are 18 million college students. There are 5,300 colleges.

There were about 12 really nuts, crazy viral videos that I responded very strongly to. Brett Weinstein, shouting people off stages. These things happened, but I think now, 13 years out of that context, I can acknowledge I probably overreacted. I think really if you look at the massive amount of students that went through the system at that time and that many universities, really how many were there of those crazy protests?

Two ways to look at things. One is the statistical method where you say, what's the average? And the average is always fine. The average college student didn't want to take part in these things. The average college student wanted to do his work, get a job, learn. Debate some ideas, probably. College students overwhelmingly want to be exposed to different ideas. But what I'm arguing is that since the great transformation, since everything became digital, Jeff Jarvis has a book called The Gutenberg Print,

a really good book. There was a period, 500 years, that was based on print, text, the Gutenberg era. That ended right around 2014. 2014 is when you get the first global cancellation, that woman who told a bad joke on Twitter and then she was fired by the time she landed in South Africa.

Yes. That was not possible in 2010. You could ruin your life in three minutes. That's right. Because the super viral dynamics of our planet have changed everything and what it is to live within a college. Not our community colleges.

It wasn't just 10 or 12, it was like the top one or 200. Generally pervasive at our elite schools was, if you say something, it could be the end of your social life. Constantly calling for the deans to be fired, constantly calling for everyone to be fired. That's right. One of my friends,

a woman who ran Hederox Academy for a while, one of her students said to her, my motto is silence is safer. And to be a college student, have that be your motto? There's a real problem with the culture. And since people often felt that at work and they felt it in many environments,

I think that's part of what led to the general shift away from the Democrats. What I think is so important in the election results is the fact that the shift from Democrats to Republicans happened in almost every group, including Asians, black men at least, Jews, every group shifted. And that means there's a pervasive problem. That's what the Carling American Man was about.

That's what so much of my work has been about since 2004 was trying to say, look, Democrats, you need to understand moral psychology. You need to understand why it is that most people care about immigration in ways that you don't. Why it is that people care about family and tradition. You have to acknowledge who the constituents are. It needs addressing. Do we think this was a backlash though to many, many, many years of the opposite groups having to say silence is safer, like marginalized groups have had to say silence is safer since the beginning of time. And so when it became easier or when it became like, oh, you feel like that too, oh, you

feel like that too, let's start speaking up. It was still a retaliation to that. Let's go through the timing. There was a time when that was true. So I was born in 1963. It just blows my mind that when I was born, it was legal to discriminate against black people in a large part of the country.

I mean, that was written, it's a law. Let's go decade by decade, 1973. The change is unbelievable. The legal change. Now you've got the women's rights movement, the gay rights movement has started, environmentalism, animal rights, you keep going, 83, even though you have Ronald Reagan as president,

socially the country is still, you know, the advances in acceptance of every possible group. Go to 1993, even more so, by 2013, when I turned 50, our first black president has been reelected, gay marriage, it's been legalized in many states. Supreme Court's about to rule on it. Trans rights are coming into view and those are quickly recognized by the Supreme Court. And so in 2013, if you are a young progressive, you should look back on this history of when

marginalized people used to have to be quiet or stay in the margins. And you should say, wow, what incredible progress every decade since 1963. Whatever we're doing in America, let's keep doing it because it's amazing. That's not what happened. That's exactly when an element of the left became much more radicalized.

And you can see it in graphs. You can see that it's young white people on the left especially suddenly moved way to the left on issues of race and immigration, way to the left on issues of race and immigration, way to the left of black people and it was especially young women. So that's the movement that was radicalized by the internet. Tumblr I think was a major place where a lot of these ideas came together about identity. The 2010s was a really interesting, transformative, and in many ways terrible time. It began with our sense that this technology is magical, it's going

to be the best thing that ever happened to democracy, the Arab Spring occupied Wall Street. We were all so optimistic about it in the 2010s. We didn't understand what it was doing to us. And I think it really did in the Democrats because it led to a set of ideas that were intense, that led to a lot of intimidation. That's what the call of the American mind was about, the intimidation, and it led to a huge backlash. The thing I was noticing that was very concerning and continues to be is I am liberal and all my friends are liberal.

I'm having conversations with all the members of this group and none of them think some of the broadcast values of the liberal party. And that's what was really concerning. I've yet to meet the person that agrees with issue A, yet that's an official part of our platform. And what's happening? It felt like the cadre system. We were all afraid to tell the truth. I was open to meeting a handful of people that thought this was a good idea,

but numerous issues, everyone I meet in real life, not on the internet, doesn't think this way. And I'm like, oh, it's truly been hijacked. No one even thinks this. And that was not possible before social media. You couldn't have a small number intimidating a large number, but now you can. James Carville has been great on this.

He's been complaining about faculty lounge politics. Because you say you haven't met a single person. Like, they're all over universities. Not a majority. Most professors are on the left, but they're liberal, they're sane. But there are certain departments in which this way of thinking is dominant.

This sort of thinking is very aggressive and intimidating. A small group ended up having so much power and that couldn't have happened before social media. Yes. Okay, so your current book, The Anxious Generation, one element of it is not a shocker to me because you brought up in the first interview seven years ago, this concept of free range parenting.

We ended up interviewing Leonor Skanezy, who we loved. She's great, she's so funny. So that aspect I knew would come up at some point in your work maybe more officially. So maybe start there because that's where you and I are really in lockstep. I was busy studying moral and political psychology. I was going to write a book called Three Stories About Capitalism and the Moral Psychology of Economic Life.

And all of a sudden things blew up on universities in 2015. It began as a side project. What's going on with young people? Like, why are they so anxious? And that led us to write The coddling of the American mind. Coddling means overprotection. And that led me to draw much more on Lenore Scanesy's work. Now I'd moved to New York in 2011 with my wife.

Our kids were very young then. We met Lenore socially and we read her book, Free Range Kids. And so we used that to help us raise our kids. And I know you and Kristen, I read that amazing story about you guys at Tivoli Gardens. I want you to tell that story. Okay, yeah.

Unless you're all sick of it. Oh, no, no, no, no, I don't know that, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't know that I have. Normally I would brag about getting an email from you commending us. I somehow resisted in that moment. Lenora and others have been saying for years, we are vastly overprotecting our kids.

So I'm 62, you're like 50. Wait, Monica, if I may ask, are you a millennial? I'm a millennial, yeah, 37. So older millennials and up, we almost all had free range childhoods. Now we grew up during a crime wave. There was a lot of crime in the 70s and 80s. But kids went out to play.

It was like, of course you're going to go out and play. What are you going to do? Sit and watch TV all day long? In the 90s, the crime wave ends, life gets much safer, drunk driving gets under control. But that's exactly the decade when we freak out about child abduction. I mean, people literally, now they won't let their seven year old go two aisles over in the grocery store because what if theyles over in the grocery store, because what if they're kidnapped in the grocery store?

It was clear that the overprotection had something to do with this, but the overprotection was kind of gradually implemented in the 80s and 90s, and the mental health crisis hit suddenly in 2012, 2013. So there was something missing from our analysis in the column. Really quick, how have you come to trust the data?

Because you born in 63, me in 75, I have never ever been asked about my anxiety level. I've never been asked about my depression level. No one ever inquired anything of any of us. So how do you make peace with trusting this data, just knowing that we're looking around now and we weren't? So in the United States, we have several long running, very good nationally representative studies.

Most countries don't have this. One of the ones that a lot of us rely on is called the Monitoring the Future Study. It began with just high school seniors, not every high school senior, but they had, I don't know if they identified a few hundred high schools, a few thousand high schools. So it began just high school seniors

that asked them a bunch of questions, including, I feel anxious every day. I can't remember what the phrasing is, but here's one of them that I remember the phrasing of is, I feel that my life is useless. And roughly 9% of them agreed with that statement, plus or minus a bit, from the 90s through 2010. So we have this long-running, it goes back to the 70s, and then they added in eighth and tenth graders sometime in the 90s.

So we have these long-running data sets, eighth, tenth, and twelfth graders, and so we 90s. So we have these long running data sets, eighth, 10th, and 12th graders. And so we can see one of them is, sometimes I like to do things just because they're a little bit dangerous. Teenagers are risk takers. And so the boys, especially, say yes. So we can plot how did that question fare. And what we find is on the question about uselessness,

only 9% on a five point scale, either strongly agree or agree. So most American high school students are like, no, I don't feel my life is useless. All of a sudden, 2013, it starts skyrocketing and it doubles within about five or seven years. So about 20% of our high school seniors think that their life is useless.

Data sets like this are full of slow rises and slow falls. You almost never find elbows. You almost never find a hockey stick. And this is what you see in chapter one of the anxious generation. Graph after graph, you find a hockey stick, especially for girls. I should make it clear for girls, it's like there's no sign of a problem.

And in 2012, boom, more than a doubling between 50 and 150 percent, depending on what you're studying. But it's never 10 or 20 percent increase. It's always 50 to 150 percent increase. Boys are doing much worse, too, but that's a little more gradual. It's not exactly 2012. It begins maybe a little before 2010, but it accelerates in the 2010s. So something went suddenly very wrong in the early 2010s. And that's what the anxious generation is about.

It's not just the overprotection, it's also, I argue, the change in the technology. Okay, I'm gonna unfortunately bring this word back again, and I know it's an aggravating one, but if we look at why there was this clamp down on the autonomy of the children in that period, you gotta call it a rational. It's an irrational fear of pedophiles,

abductions. Strangers, kidnappings, yeah. We would have to agree that that was a moral panic. I lived through this satanic moral panic. People that weren't alive then can't really even imagine we were sending kids to prison in Memphis because they worshiped this poster of Metallica. Like this was happening. Kids were going to prison for Memphis because they worshiped this poster of Metallica, like this was happening.

Kids were going to prison for Satanism. The next round, in my memory, was this big moral panic about abductions. A man with a white van. Sexual abuse, yes. A response to it was far more damaging than this perceived threat of the abductors. Right, so this was a true moral panic. And it's an important word.

A moral panic, they have certain properties. It spreads through the media. People read a an important word, a moral panic. They have certain properties. It's spread through the media. People read a report about something and then they get afraid. The definition of a moral panic includes that it's not real. If there really was a sudden wave of kidnappings by men in white vans, well then it would be rational to fear it.

The FBI stats on kidnapping are astonishing. Any idea how many kids get kidnapped by a stranger any year, like ballpark? What do you think it is? In America? In America. By a stranger, not a family member year, like ballpark. What do you think it is? In America. In America. By a stranger, not a family member, because those are high. Yeah.

500. I don't want to act like I'm ahead of the question I know where it's going. Honestly, maybe 60 to 100. That's about right. The right's obsessed with child abductions. They think everyone's a pedophile still. They have this whole movie,

they think Bill Gates has kids. Right, when TV really goes for that. They think Bill Gates has kids right wing TV really goes for that They think there's sex trafficking happening on an order of like millions of kids a year and you're like, where are the parents? Why isn't anyone reporting this? Where are these people two things one is on the true kidnappings? It's in the ballpark of one or two hundred cases a year So the point is it's very very rare rare in the real world. Now, once we move to online, and this is what's so insane about what's happening, parents are afraid to let their kids run around outside

because they're afraid they'll get picked up by a sex predator. The sex predators are all on Instagram. That's where they move. That's where they move. Because they can contact people anonymously. They can groom them, and then sometimes they can arrange to meet them.

Or once you get a naked photo of a kid, now you've got power over them. You can make him or her do anything you want on camera for you and your, I mean, it's sick what's happening. Yes, yes. If we're focusing on online, I don't think it's a moral panic. The data from an insider at Instagram, Arturo Bejar,

he found, I think it was something like one in seven teens reported some kind of inappropriate sexual contact, like somebody trying to hit on them, pick them up. One in seven every week. Oh my God. You know, it's hard to know what the exact numbers are, but the point is it's much more dangerous online than in the real world.

So we grossly overreacted. And here's what we learned about why did we freak out in the nineties, just as things were getting safe? And the answer is that that's when we stop trusting our neighbors. The key work here is Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone. In the fifties and sixties,

we had very, very high social capital in America. We trusted our neighbors. And back then, there were men going around. My sister, when she was a teenager, a man stopped in his car and opened the door, and he was naked and masturbating. And it was just like, that stuff just happened.

Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But by the 90s, that guy would be locked away for 20 years. So back when there were actually more risks, we trusted our neighbors, we let our kids out, and some bad stuff happened to him. This would be a great time for me to point out, like, I was sexually abused, but almost all sexual abuse cases are a trusted person.

Right? They're not a stranger. That's right. And the fact that it was often in institutions, whether it be the Catholic church or sports teams or Boy Scouts. So that was a huge advance was to say, look, all these organizations, they have some bad apples

and then they cover up. That's what they're really guilty of. And that all came out in the nineties. And so in a sense, that was a legitimate reason to think like, whoa, this is much broader than we thought. But at the same time, crime and danger was plummeting then. And we didn't really pick up on that, but it's that we lost trust in our neighbors

And one way we can see this is that the same thing happens in Canada and the UK Where they don't have the high crime rates that we do and so it's just around the anglosphere We change we spend all the time on television. We don't know our neighbors and we lose trust Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert... if you dare. Imagine this. You help your little brother land a great job abroad. But when he arrives, the job doesn't exist. Instead, he's trapped in a heavily guarded compound, forced to sit at a computer and

scam innocent victims. All while armed guards stand by with shoot to kill orders. Scam Factory, the explosive new true crime podcast from Wondery, exposes a multi-billion dollar criminal empire operating in plain sight. Told through one family's harrowing account of sleepless nights, desperate phone calls, and dangerous rescue attempts. Scam Factory reveals a brutal truth. The only way out is to scam their way out.

Follow Scam Factory on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Scam Factory, early and ad-free, right now, by joining Wondery+. At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather it was stolen from me. And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes, and politics. I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours.

Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again. So I think listeners can expect me to be chatting with folks, both recognizable and unrecognizable names, about the way that people have navigated roads to triumph. My hope is that people will finish an episode of Reclaiming and feel like they filled their tank up. They connected with the people that I'm talking to and leave with maybe some

nuggets that helped them feel a little more hopeful. Follow reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to reclaiming early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. I would also add there was a new component around that time, much like the internet, which was the daytime salacious talk show. There were new offerings. There was cable. There was a proliferation of options.

It wasn't three networks. So you could find someone at any given moment on TV in the 90s talking about some abductor. A megaphone was given to a lot of people that you would have otherwise not heard from. That's right. So that was part of it. What I'm coming to see is that you have to keep your eye on technology because technology changes so fast.

And then the downstream effects of technology are so vast. So the arrival of television had huge effects. Then television going to cable with hundreds of channels has huge effects. And then microcasting and then cable to social media, micro, microcasting. I see that you have, you have on the Harari's book on your shelf, Nexus, in there he says often,

democracy is a conversation. Well, what happens when that conversation moves on to Twitter? It becomes much more polarizing and disparate and fragmented. So yes, that's what we're talking about here, the way that technology changes everything about our political lives. But to return to the children,

so we knew that overprotection was a piece of the story, but it couldn't explain this incredibly sudden sharp turn up in around 2013 in many, many countries. And so in the coddling, we had about a page or two where we said, now social media really comes in around the right time. Facebook opens up to the world around 2007, maybe that influenced what we then knew was Gen Z, and especially around 2011, 2012, it gets much more viral. So we speculated, you know, maybe it has some, but we don't know.

Well, that was what we wrote in 2017. And after the book came out, some researchers challenged me and said, oh, you can't say it's social media, there's no evidence. I said, really? Wait, I saw all kinds of studies that did show at least a correlation, a couple of experiments. So I started gathering all the studies I could find in these big Google documents. You go to anxiousgeneration.com slash reviews. You can find all these Google documents where we collect all the evidence on one side, all the evidence on the other.

We organize it by method so you can get a sense like, OK, what is the nature of the research that's out there? And as I began to see that actually the correlational studies are pretty consistent. There are some that show no correlation, but those tend to be all digital media for all kids with all kinds of outcomes. Every time you zoom in on just social media,

for girls, anxiety and depression, you find a much bigger correlation. The second is that there are now about 25 experiments where you randomly assign people, usually college students, it's hard to work with 12 year olds. Where's people on earth? That's right, the weirdest people on earth,

that's right, famous article. But where you randomly assign people to get off social media. And if you look just at the studies that kept them off for more than a week, almost all of them find benefits on measures of anxiety and depression. And so once you have correlational studies and you have experimental studies

and you have eyewitness testimony, because Gen Z generally says this is harming them. It's very hard to find members of Gen Z who are saying, no, social media is great. We love it. It's good for us. And we have confessions from the companies. On my sub stack, after Babel, we have an article, TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale, using just their own words from the lawsuits against them. We know some of their internal memos and correspond,

just their own words. They know they're harming millions and millions of kids a year. Just a little telling they have a different version running in China than they have here. Oh my God, that's right. Chinese kids get spinach all about how great China is and how to be an astronaut. And we get fentanyl and dog poop. What would be helpful, I think, is the first, because I wouldn't have known how to delineate the generations. So Gen X, which I'm a member of, are you?

No, I'm the last of the baby boomers. You're the last of, okay. You're bridging it. And then we have millennials. Millennials is what era? Roughly 1981 through 1995. It's such a big group. I think it's too big.

And that's Monica. Monica's representing. I'm 87. We have's too big. And that's Monica. Monica's representative. I'm 87. So we have three generations here. And then Gen Z is from? I say 1996. Pugh says 1997. Who knows? You can't say, but roughly 1996. Gene Twenge says 1995. So if you're born in the mid-90s or later, you are Gen Z. And what I came to see is the key thing is look at early puberty. If you were born in 1995, last of the millennials, you're turning 15 in 2010.

You probably had a flip phone. You didn't have Instagram in 2010. And you might've traded in later, but the point is you made it most of the way through puberty before the great transformation, before the great wiring. And you didn't get this stuff until really more like college. Your mental health is probably fine.

But if you were born in the year 2000, you turn 15 in 2015. And so your first phone might well have been a smartphone and the iPhone gets a front-facing camera in 2010. And Instagram comes out in 2010, but Facebook buys it in 2012. That's when everyone goes on it. If you were born in the year 2000,

you went through early puberty as a girl, especially on Instagram with your phone in your hand. Half of our teenagers say they are online almost constantly, phones always in their hand. And that I believe is what created Gen Z. That's why Gen Z is different from the millennials, is what were they doing in early puberty? Yeah, they have no period of time.

They have no foot in pre-internet, pre-smartphone. So it's a very interesting group to look at. When we talk about all these issues that are in the anxious generation, we are talking about Gen Z. Yes, that's right. Gen Z and below or just that one? And below. I mean, I was always just thinking about Gen Z, but we don't know when Gen Alpha begins.

Marketers tell us 2010 or 2011. I think it might actually depend more on TikTok. I think TikTok is transformative for brain development. And so it might be that the generation shaped by TikTok is very different. But for now, we're going with 2010. Let's say 2011 is the first birth year of gen alpha. OK, so a couple things you lay out in the book which are relevant is you have 90% of the mass of your brain by like six years old.

But what was really happening through development is building all these neural networks, getting different areas of the brain to communicate. And that is a long journey that varies between males and females. But the frontal lobe is fully on board the prefrontal cortex. You're in your 20s, right? I'm 25, usually.

Okay, so that's how the brain works. And now what are your thoughts on how this technology has interfered with that process? Neural networks are amazing things. I was thinking going into AI in 1986 when I was done with college and I was working in computers. And AI back then was based on programming normal computer language to do things. And it didn't get very far.

It's only once they developed the idea that, hey, how about we make something like a neural network? And then you train it. And of course we all know the training data needed to train ChatGPT is enormous. And the stuff you put in is gonna shape the connections made. So what. And the stuff you put in is gonna shape the connections made.

So what happens when the stuff that gets put into our neural network is the stuff that we evolved for, which is first you learn how to move your body, and then you learn to walk and run and eye contact and social life and talking and climbing and fleeing predators and forming coalitions and all the stuff that you have to learn. And you watch kids, it's amazing.

They'll do something, it falls down, they do it again, it falls down, they do it again. I mean, they repeat, repeat, repeat. They've got no quit. It's really impressive. It's not like any child ever tried to start walking, it's like, fuck that, that was too hard. I guess I'll crawl. Although now if you give a kid an iPad, they might say,

fuck that, this is too interesting. I'm staying on the iPad. What would be over there that's as interesting as this? Yeah, that's right. So my point is that brain development takes a very, very long time. Humans have an extraordinarily long childhood. And the only way that we could have such a long childhood

is if it was incredibly valuable, because evolution is a battle for survival. Why would you delay reproduction by so long? Culture is very, very powerful, very important to learn. And so we've evolved cultural mechanisms of cultural learning, and we still use this. We look not just to our parents, we look at all the adults. No child has their parents accent.

They have the accent of the people around them. So we can live in modern ways, but you still have to have this pathway of child development. Now what happens when we now give kids iPhones and iPads? In Britain, there's a shocking statistic. One quarter of their five year olds have their own smartphone because parents around the world have discovered your kid's crying, you need to make dinner, take the phone, you're happy, I'm happy, I can do my stuff. And it's like drugging your kid.

A distinction I'm coming to see, which is very, very useful, is I don't want to tell people, be afraid of screens, never let your kid on a screen. What I'm coming to see, as I talk with my undergrads especially, and I realized how serious the attention fragmentation is. This is, I think, ultimately more serious than the mental illness is the attention fragmentation. So I'm coming to see

that distinguish between story time and fragmenting time. So stories are good things. Humans are storytelling animals. We love stories. All cultures tell stories. That's part of how we socialize our kids. And that's why literature is so important and why reading novels is so important. Stories are good. And a television screen is actually pretty good way of portraying a story. So don't be afraid of letting your kids have story time. Not six hours a day, but on a plane ride, let your kid watch a movie, fantastic.

But fragmenting time is I'm doing this thing, but then I got a pop-up, I do this other thing. I'm watching this movie, but I'm a little bored, so I'll check out this. Oh, and I'll go there. And so if you give a kid an iPad, that's fragmenting time. How much fragmenting time should you give your kid? As close to zero as possible forever.

But don't be afraid of stories. So you see four foundational harms from all this. One is social deprivation. Seems pretty intuitive, but go ahead and expound a little bit on that. Kids are incredibly sociable, social. We socialize each other. We play in groups, mixed-age groups.

There's clear data on how much time kids were spending with friends until around 2010, 2012, about two hours a day on average. It's called the American Time Use Survey. How much time did you spend eating? How much time did you spend watching TV? So you can see until around 2012, kids 15 to 24 is the youngest age group.

They were spending about two hours a day with their friends outside of school and work. And then you see this incredibly sharp drop around 2012 in that period, down to the point where in 2019, just before COVID, it's gone from two hours a day down to like 45 minutes a day, which is just a little bit more than older people are spending.

And then COVID comes in, we get COVID restrictions, and it just goes down a little further. Gen Z began practicing social distancing as soon as they got a smartphone, and they finished the job almost by 2019, and it just goes down a little further. Gen Z began practicing social distancing as soon as they got a smartphone, and they finished the job almost by 2019, and then certainly by 2020, because with a phone, you're always interrupted.

It's always more interesting than the person standing next to you. And my students complain, like you could sit with somebody at lunch in the cafeteria, and they're on their phone half the time. And so it just fragments, it disrupts. There's a great line in the book from Sherry Turkle at MIT. She says, with our phones, we are forever elsewhere. And so this is devastating to social development. Yeah. You know, you meet kids, anyone with a partner

experience. Yes. We're all doing it. But I guess our brains have developed before. We just got lucky. We're damaging our relationships. We're not damaging our brains. Yeah. But that leads right into the second foundational harm, which is attention fragmentation. And this is the one that I'm beginning to think is possibly the most serious. The book focused on mental illness because we have good data about that. We don't have good data on attention fragmentation. But in talking with my students, and these are students who got into a top university at New York University, some of them say they can't watch a movie.

And some of them say, or they have friends who can't watch a movie unless they're also on a second screen because they can't focus on anything for that long. They can't read a book. One of my students said, I take out a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok. What is the cost to humanity if half of our kids can't read a book? Now, just to play devil's advocate right here.

Please. I would imagine that is how their workplace will end up looking. So I think we're moving into an era where it's like AI is doing a lot of these tasks, AI has endless concentration. You know, are they just getting prepared for the life they're going to occupy? It's not the life I want, but is it maybe just the life of the future and I need to, again, check my being 50 and getting more conservative? What do we think about that? Yeah, I hear that argument occasionally.

Like, well, the technology is here to stay. They need to learn how to use it. So they should start early. You know, I mean, sex is here to stay, but we're not going to start our kids at six or seven. Let them have normal development. There's a time for it. What I would say as a college professor

is if you want to send your kids to me at NYU Stern, a business school, or preparing for these sorts of careers you're talking about, and I could choose between kids who had an iPhone or iPad from age five and were always on it, and can use the technology, but can't think, can't focus, can't write, can't look you in the eye. I mean, how are you going to succeed in business?

If on the other hand, I could get kids who were raised in a homeschooled Christian environment, they had no technology until they were 18, I suppose they were going to come to college, they're going to pick up how to use the technology in about three days. It's all so intuitive, it's not like you're going to fall so deeply behind. That's right. The Millennials in the 90s, your generation, you guys grew up with the internet, but you learned how to program what a motherboard is and swapping in chips.

I mean there was learning before, but now these things are so easy to use and they're designed to be addictive. The early internet was not designed to be addictive, it was designed to be useful. So no, I reject that argument. It's much, much better to let healthy brain development at least get most of the way through before you shatter it with the constant interruptions and fragmenting. It's interesting, yeah.

It parallels a lot of social issues of the time. It's like, when do we allow children to do whatever they want? Well, circling back to ADHD, the attention fragmentation is that. So is it ADHD or is it this? It's just that we're so addicted to these things. Well, and that brings us right to another

of the foundations, which is addiction. And this is one that we mentioned in the book, but I'm coming to see is much more serious than I realized. So yes, let's talk about addiction a bit. It's finally wandered into my field of expertise, addiction. All right, so I'll interview you about addiction. The key neural into my field of expertise, addiction. All right. So I'll interview you about it. The key neural process here is, of course, dopamine. Dopamine is sometimes said to be a neurotransmitter of reward,

but it's not reward like I did something, I get a reward. There's no satiation. Exactly. It's the opposite of satiation. It's really more neurotransmitter of motivation. You do something, it feels good, and your brain says, oh, that felt good. Let's do it again. Which in our ancestral environment was good like you taste something like, oh it tastes sweet let's have more and more more grab it all. I'll just add right now because I think it's interesting for people to think of

when they drink like if you read Dopamine Nation or Molecular More, both those books are great. The joy of drinking is the first two drinks that is the most pleasurable period because that's the dopamine dump. It's I'm feeling the shifting of reality what could be on the other side of this new reality. Beyond two drinks is inebriation. So you're no longer getting dopamine. So if people are wondering like what is that experience where it's like the first two are great and I feel optimistic and energized and then the rest is just inebriation because there's no dopamine. Okay, and that's what you really love is the dopamine. Yeah, well, yeah, then what really happens is then the next day you are anticipating the first

drink. You're in a deficit at that point. It's all about then just getting the drink as you're living in that dopamine dump. That's the key word is deficit. So I'm now studying educational technology because our schools are stuffed full of ed tech and a lot of it is gamified. Hey, let's teach kids math. Let's make it a fun game where they get rewards. If you do that you'll get more engagement but there's a cost. The more activities we give our kids that lead them to quick dopamine which

is you do something simple you get a reward. Do something simple get a reward like a slot machine, like social media. You never know what's gonna come but sometimes it's good. If you gamify a quarter of a kid's day, that's a lot of quick dopamine. The brain is going to react by down regulating dopamine neurons that are less sensitive to dopamine. And so now when you take away the gamification, now they're in a deficit state,

which means everything is boring and unpleasant. The human body is the master at homeostasis. So if you bring it up, it must bring itself down. Not on everything, but on anything that involves dopamine. Yes, absolutely. And it's a asymmetric offset. So it's five minutes of dopamine and the cost of that, the bad chemicals you experience go on for two hours.

If you think about what you might call quick dopamine versus slow dopamine. So slow dopamine is suppose a boy sets out to build a tree house or a racing car. Every time it makes progress, that's rewarding, but you're going towards the goal. You're keeping focused. Now this is what executive function is. Executive function is the ability to say, here's my goal, I'm going to do the hard work.

Along the way I get rewards for making progress. And when I'm done, it feels so good. Yeah, delayed gratification. That's right. So that's all really good. But what I'm coming to see is I underestimated what's happening to boys, because I focus more on the girls

because the data is just so much clearer on social media and girls. But with boys, they get the video games early and the video games are so much better than what I had. We had Pong, I would like the first video game. It was kind of fun. Colecovision, I think. Colecovision, that's right.

Atari, Asteroid. The boys, it starts with the video games, which is really quick dopamine. It's incredibly intense. They're beautiful, they're exciting. And many parents have observed once they let their boy the video games, which is really quick dopamine. It's incredibly intense. They're beautiful. They're exciting. And many parents have observed once they let their boy play video games. And a little bit is okay. I don't want to cause a panic here on video games.

But if your kid is playing three hours of video games a day, seven days a week, probably that's going to have dopamine effects because they're in a state of deficit. And so everything else is more boring. Then we have to ramp it up. Okay, they're in school, they're bored. Let's give them gamified math. And we'll give them gamified this and that. And oh, let's let them keep it up. Okay, they're in school, they're bored. Let's give them gamified math. And we'll give them gamified this and that.

And oh, let's let them keep their phones on them, which is insane. A study just came up from Dimitri Kostakis. On average, American students, I think it was high school, spend an hour and a half a day in school on their phone. Again, if you gamify, gamify, gamify, then the rest of life is incredibly boring.

And that includes talking to people. We're really doing our kids a disservice. Oh, and then I haven't even mentioned the vaping and the marijuana pens and the crypto gambling and sports betting. You get the sense from my book that the girls are in worse shape than the boys, but I'm really, that's not true.

At age 14, the girls are in worse shape because the boys have these amazing video games. They've got incredible porn. They're enjoying their dopamine-filled pursuits, but I think they're harming their brains more even than the girls are, which helps explain why girls are making progress career-wise. Boys are increasingly living at home with their parents because they're less suited for employment.

And the gambling epidemic is soon to rival the opioid. Like, there's a lot of people now starting to shine a light on just how extreme this epidemic is. If you have any influence, try to roll this back. It's insane that this has been legalized. This is just fishing for boys' dopamine circuits. Yeah. Richard Reeves wrote of boys and men. this epidemic is. If you have any influence, try to roll this back. It's insane that this has been legalized. This is just fishing for boys' dopamine circuits. Yeah.

Richard Reeves wrote of Boys and Men. He told me that when sports betting is legalized in a state, the number of bankruptcies goes up very quickly, and that's mostly young men. And so we're just destroying young men and their futures. Yeah, and then you're feeding into this suicide epidemic. Well, of course, it's also depressing to be so bored. If you're living in a deficit and everything's boring

and there's nothing exciting, that is depression. Yeah, you're in discomfort a lot of your day if you're not on the thing. It's identical to drug addiction. Okay, so now the data, and you've already into data, but the social deprivation, sleep deprivation, we should talk about it, really probably impacts sleep. Sleep is so important, we're realizing much more now

than we did 20 years ago. Because when I was in college, it was like, we don't really know why people sleep, all animals sleep, but when you keep people up at night, they don't die. It was known for a long time that REM sleep does have something to do with consolidating memory. So there's always been a relationship between sleep and learning, we know that.

But more recently, I don't remember when this was found, but there's a lymphatic system in our bodies that gets rid of broken molecules and proteins and flushes it out. The brain does not have a lymphatic system to flush it out, but deep sleep seems to involve a pattern of neural firing that seems to do some of that. And so it is about the brain's repair. Sleep is incredibly important. It's also important for your mental health. So we know that once you give kids, touchscreen devices are the most engaging, the most addictive, much more so than a television screen.

Television is entertaining, but it doesn't allow you to do stimulus response stuff, whereas a touchscreen does. So if you give a kid an iPad or an iPhone, and you let them have it at night in their room, not all, but a lot of them are gonna be on it instead of sleeping. And so there's the blue light, there's the stimulation, there's the social drama.

And so a lot of kids are now really sleep deprived. Now what happens? You're sleep deprived, you go into class, you can't learn as much, you do more poorly in school, you're more stressed out by your grades, you're irritable in short temper, so your relationships suffer. And all of this just creates a loop

where you become more and more depressed and dysfunctional. So just to go through the four, it's social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Those are the four big effects. So if you give your kid a smartphone or an iPad that they can hold on to, your kid is at risk for these four things. Again, I'm not saying never give them an iPad, but if they have it, it's their own, they can customize it, especially if they get social media accounts. Now they've got so much stuff coming in.

Okay, so the results of all this, as you reported, among American girls between 10 and 14, emergency room visits for self-harm grew by 188%. Yeah, it's stunning. Okay, so now this is really disturbing, but of course I am inclined to think of all the variables that could add to this. Please. It's hard to parse out these things. So one thing is we know the contagion effect. We just had this expert on sleep sickness where 3,000 of 5,000

town members all got the same sleep sickness. The Tourette's one. The Tourette's. TikTok Tourette's. Yeah. Right, so this power of contagion I don't think can be underestimated. So it's kind of chicken That's right, yeah. Right, so this power of contagion, I don't think can be underestimated. So it's kind of chicken or egg. Were they on these devices so long that they wanted to self-harm, or did they witness self-harm on the devices? I guess the results are the same regardless,

but for me, I need to work through what's going on. Yeah, I think it's both, but I think it's especially the latter that is the contagion effect. So here's the way to look at it. There've been these, they were called dance plagues or dance fevers. You find reports throughout the middle ages in Europe

and people would begin dancing and they would dance to exhaustion. Some people would die. And it was primarily young women who are susceptible to this. Now, one thing we know about boys and girls, girls are just more socially aware. So girls are more open to influence

from other girls, especially. This has been over a long time. So what happens when you give everybody a flip phone and they can text each other, but you're only texting your friends? Not much, that's actually pretty good. And that's why the millennials mental health didn't plunge. Talking on the phone is great.

Texting is not as good because it's not synchronous, but it's not bad just with your friends. But what happens by 2015? Well, actually let's look at 2013 when this all starts. Everyone's trading in their flip phone for a smartphone. They're getting off of Facebook on their parents' computer. And now they've got Instagram on their own phone. And now they're communicating not just with one friend,

but with groups of friends. So it's more display. Oh, and then you start working in strangers and friends of friends. And before you know it, you're getting into these interest groups or you're following an influencer group on YouTube or much later on TikTok. Why is it that anxiety, why is there this

sharp elbow for the girls, but not the boys? Why is it that in 2012, it's like someone flipped a light switch and the girls instantly in many countries start checking into hospital emergency rooms more often? That's not true for boys. So I think that's the contagion. If you expose young girls who already are susceptible to social influence, more so than older women or than teenage boys, you super connect them by a thing driven by an algorithm based in Menlo Park, California, which is going to feed you

the things that it has concluded are most likely to keep you on. And that is girls and young women showing extreme dieting behaviors and get ready with me videos and here's how to make your lips bigger or whatever. All the stuff that it is. Well, and the algorithm knows it must continue to get more and more extreme.

Exactly. It has a natural trajectory. So more and more extreme for girls socialization and more and more extreme on political extremity. And boys on YouTube, they're getting radicalized and becoming white nationalists. Exactly. It's like these very predictable paths.

This is why everything is so crazy now, because we super connected ourselves. You know, we always thought connection was good. Hey, should we build roads to connect cities and have trade? Yes, let's do that. Should we have a postal service? Yes, let's do that. Of course, there are always problems, but the net effect is always enormously positive.

This, I think, might be the first one where it's enormously negative. Again, connecting by individual communication, fine, but it's the algorithm driven. Is this a good idea to have our kids talking with strangers at the age of 10 and 11? I don't think so. I mean, it's literally the first thing our parents told us,

don't talk to strangers. And now these kids are just out there like literally talking to strangers. Okay, and then the anxiety and depression, and we kind of already talked about it, you trust this figure. I'm a little more on the fence about how much of it. The anxiety and depression rates have risen 150%

for this cohort. Well, wait, hold on. I tend to say the rates have risen between 50 and 150% because this particular study asked the question in this way, of this age group. So I can't give you a flat number. All I can say is that the numbers are generally between 50 and 150%.

I can also say that the over 100 numbers, those are almost exclusively from pre-teen girls. If we look at girls 10 to 14, we often find more than 100% increase, sometimes 200. Self-harm is actually three or 400% increase. But if we're talking about older teens, we tend not to get over 100%. It tends to be sometimes 40%,

more like 50 to 80%, generally speaking. Again, I just think we're really trying to figure out how much of it is the contagion, how much of it is, it's in our vernacular. Any kid now knows numerous personality disorders from the DSM, they know numerous mood disorders. I didn't know any of them. I knew like depression, I guess was the word I used.

So just the awareness is something, how much it's talked about is something. Ask me about destigmatization. Please say, John, isn't some of it just destigmatization? Okay, great. John, isn't some of it just destigmatization? Destigmatization. You asked to say he's dyslexic.

That was a big thing you asked. Destigmatization. Destigmatization. Thank you, Monica. Yeah, she came in. So we can put all these things together, because I get this a lot. So look, I said a lot of things in the book.

There's been almost no pushback on any of it except for two topics. One is, is there really mental health crisis? And two, is it caused by social media? Those are the two areas of academic debate. On the first one, is there really a mental health crisis? Isn't this just destigmatization? Isn't it just that Gen Z is comfortable talking about this? Oh, and they know all these words for it.

It's the cultural capital of the day. Isn't that all it is? That's a perfectly good argument. We should ask that about any disease. But so my mother sent me to a couple of psychologists in the mid 70s because I had various nervous ticks and they seemed like nervous habits. But that was very shameful and I wouldn't tell anyone that I'd been to see a variety of therapists in the 70s. Yeah, and then you therapists in the seventies. And then, you know, in the eighties and nineties, it begins to be much more destigmatized.

We start talking about it. There are television shows about it. And so the destigmatization has been going steadily from the seventies to today. So why was there no change in any of these measures from the late nineties through 2011? There's no change. And all of a sudden, boom.

Well, look, I acknowledge it's part of the tech But I would say even back when you were deciding who you would tell that you had gone to therapy You're making some selection. You're not telling everybody and definitely you're evaluating what dude wants to hear especially with dude You're like this fucking guy working on my sink doesn't want to know it's a therapy You have some social awareness Whereas you enter this world where if you choose to you can be in a silo where everyone talks about it. That's right. So it's very powerful. Yeah, that's the similar thing. Talking back to the way way beginning, we were talking about race relations over time, it definitely has progressed. Mental health

awareness has progressed a ton over time. But it's still like if you're in it, you can tell the slight difference, right? Like if you use the race for me, I was born in 87. It was definitely better than when my mom arrived, but I had to blend in and I wasn't really like, oh, I need to be talking about being Indian. You're going to nod along to a lot of racist jokes that were totally commonplace. Yeah. Silence was better, really.

And I'm young-ish. So you can look at it overall and say it's gotten better, but there are nuances when you're in it. And same with mental health. It overall has progressed, but now with the internet, it's like we can all talk about it. But was it experienced as a release? Like, oh, finally, like in 2010, we couldn't talk about this,

but now they're all on Instagram by 2013, like in 2010, we couldn't talk about this, but now they're all Instagram by 2013, 21. Oh, now we can talk about it. Is it that, or is it that we transition from stigmatizing it to de-stigmatizing, de-stigmatizing, de-stigmatizing? To incentivizing. Exactly, at a certain point, it becomes prestigious. It's social capital.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. And that is a terrible thing to do to kids, especially to girls. And that's what I think happened. Yeah, that's fair. The last thing you wanna do to to do to kids especially to girls And that's what I think happens Yeah, the last thing you want to do to girls is say you'll get more prestige if you have more I agree with that Yeah, and I want to put a ribbon on this because I think the tension that exists is like there's people like me There's people Steven Pinker There's people that want to point out that the long arc is very very

Positive and I agree and what I think some people fear when they hear that is that those people, myself included, are saying job all done. You don't have to give up improving because you've acknowledged there's been huge improvement. I think that's what some of the disconnect is, is people interpret that as you saying job's done. But that's not what I'm saying. It's like we're on a good path. Let's not be defeatist about this or pessimistic.

And I agree with that. I think what some people who are listening or watching might be like, why aren't you saying this part? It's just the truth and this is fine. But normally it is one type of person who is saying that loudly and it is often a white tall, smart, handsome, very handsome, very articulate, educated man. Sure. Who's saying what? Who's saying? We've made great progress.

Oh. But I agree, we have made great progress, but I think it's easier if you're not one of those people to say, and it's not as easy as saying that. And it still sucks, you can say. I don't wanna say it still sucks. I get so much value out of Chappelle. I just love when something happens

and I've processed it one way, I go, oh my, I can't wait to hear how Chappelle processed this, right, because he is coming from such a different and unique place than I am. And I am so regularly reminded that this is an all day occurrence for black people. Yes, those things have happened, but let me show you how we got devalued

over this other group in two seconds, or how this happened. He's very good at reminding us, it's a joke if you think this is over. So I greatly appreciate that. What I'm pitching is like, we have room for both things. One is like, we have made huge strides and it's still a beat down to be a black man or woman

in this country, much more than all experience. Agreed. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. An interesting finding about all this research, a lot of this research is done with my research partner Zach Rausch. He graphed all these studies by both religiosity and by politics. So on the monitoring the future study, one of the questions is, religion is important in my family. Do you agree strongly, agree a little?

So five points go. And when you break it up by those who agreed, strongly or weakly, versus those who disagreed, you find is that the secular families, the kids, they go up sharply. Whereas the religious families, they go up just a little. So they were somewhat protected. And we find the same thing for politics.

Seniors in high school, they added the question on politics in the nineties. So you can see if you say that you're liberal, you go up a lot. But if you say you're conservative, you go up just a little. And so part of what's happening here is that people that are deeply anchored

in a community of adults, that is a moral community with an order that is binding, where you have obligations and duties and you have to do these rituals or visit your grandmother, you weren't just washed out to see on Instagram. We know that liberal girls use social media the most. They simply spend more hours on it. And the stuff they're consuming is a lot of victimhood stuff.

They're consuming a lot of really disempowering ideas about how the world is against you, and you're going to have all these problems, and there's so much sexism. It's really liberal girls, especially secular liberal girls, as soon as they moved onto Instagram, they're the ones who got much more depressed and anxious, or at least that's where it was concentrated. And so I think it is some of these ideas about victimhood that became so popular on campus in the 2010s that are disempowering.

It's interesting. I've not thought of this until you're laying it out, but it's almost like we do have a natural compulsion to atone and suffer, and there's an outlet for it in religion. It's like you're born with sin, you battle it, that's the burden you have. And in the absence of that, we kind of need a burden

and we need some toxicity we're fighting. It's kind of interesting that if you don't have an outlet for it, and religion does provide that for you, you'll somehow find it. I mean, we all find religion, I think we could agree on that. It's like, if you live in Hollywood, food is the religion. It's impure, it's toxic, it's inorganic.

It's all these concepts we just love, we're built to be drawn to. I would agree with that. From my book, The Righteous Mind, the subtitle is why good people are divided by politics and religion. And the analysis that I give there is that we evolved as tribal creatures.

The key that religion does for us is actually creates a community. So I follow the sociologist Emile Durkheim as my favorite thinker of all time. He said the purpose of a religion is to create, to bind together a group in a moral order that then constrains us. And we can find meaning and connection within that.

And when you don't have that constraint, when you can do whatever you want, that's the state he called anomie or normlessness. And that I think is part of what hit a lot of kids in the early 2010s, the sense that there's no clear guide for anything. The hedonic treadmill. And if it's just getting pleasure and then you adapt.

And so that's why I think we see that finding that I told you about earlier, which is all of a sudden, my life feels useless. And it goes from 9% to about 20% of American teenagers are agreeing because their lives are useless. All they're doing is consuming content. Yeah. Okay, well let's get into the four solutions. You lay out the four foundational harms, but

you also lay out four solutions and I'm in agreement on all these. So no smartphones before high school. Yes, let's talk about that. The day you give your kid a touchscreen device, a smartphone or an iPad is the day that that will kid a touchscreen device, a smartphone or an iPad, is the day that that will become the most interesting thing for him or her. It's like having BF Skinner in a box because it can show you something

and then you behave and you get rewarded. So it can train you much more than a television ever could. And of course they're gonna have those eventually, but I'm trying to say, let's clear it out of middle school. I'm really interested in focus, especially on early puberty. So we're on 11 to 13, let's clear it out of that school. I'm really interested in focus, especially on early puberty. So we're on 11 to 13. Let's clear it out of that.

The key to the four norms is that they're all collective solutions. It's really hard for a parent to say, no, sweetie, you can't have a smartphone. I'm going to give you a phone. You're going to be the only kid in your class. You're the only kid. You're the pariah.

The other kids are going to make fun of you. You're going to be left out. So that's a very painful choice. And most parents don't make it. And so it ends up that all the kids have a smartphone. It's now going down into elementary school. So your girls are how old now? Ten and twelve. Do they have any kind of phone? Yeah they have iPods that they can make their home movies on. That's really all they do on it. And then YouTube they're only allowed to watch a

single show Dr. Mike because it's super informative. He's great. I love it. So yeah those are kind of the parameters. Can they text? If they're on Wi-Fi at home, they can text. Communicate with their friends? Yes. Okay. I am aware of all the fear. And then I have my anecdotal life, which is I'm around a lot of kids, our whole friendship

group, and there's fucking 14 kids in the group, right? And I hear in all these horror stories, and I'm hearing what people deal with, and I'm just actually not seeing these zombie teens addicted to their phones. I had all this fear about giving my daughter this phone. I engraved on it, no games. So there was no games allowed on it. I said, yes, I want you to make short movies.

That's great. And I want you to have music, and I want you to be able to read and listen to books on tape. So I'm all for it. And then I just deep panicked that they were going to get obsessed with it. They have it.

They forget to charge it. A month goes by and they go, oh, I want to do whatever and they charge it. It does not happen. Tell me what they do after school and on weekends. Are they seeing friends or are they in after school programs the whole time? They're here running around or riding motorcycles in the neighborhood. Like we're very out and about. Just the two of them or they're with other kids?

Oh, so yes. And this is what you read about. I'm like, go to the store, get the fuck out of here. Do whatever you want. I trust you, you know how to get home. You know how to flag a stranger. So they've had really a ton of autonomy, I think relative to other kids I'm reading about.

Are there any other kids that they're doing this with or are they the only free range kids and everyone else is overprotected? They're pretty much on their own, except for our pod has as of similar ethos. Good, how many kids is that? That is 11 kids. Fantastic, do they see them on a weekly basis?

They see them nonstop. That's it, okay, good. So let me return to the four norms, and then we'll come back to this, because the way to break out of this trap, where we've got 10 year olds wasting their lives away, scrolling through TikTok and Instagram, four norms. No smartphone before high school.

Just give them a flip phone, a basic phone, a phone watch, let them text with their friends. No social media before 16. Social media is wildly inappropriate for kids. Sex, the violence, the addiction, the drug sales on Snap and other things. Third norm is phone-free schools. It's completely insane. When we were kids, you couldn't bring your television into class and watch TV during class.

That'd be great if you rolled in a Zenith council. Yeah, that's right. With your TiVo and electric guitar and everything else. So it's phone-free schools. That's got to happen. It's happening fast. It's going to happen here in California statewide, not here. That's great. And then the fourth norm is far more independence, responsibility, and freedom in the real world. The key is don't just think of this like, oh, I'm going to say no to this and no to that. The key is give't just think of this like, oh, I'm gonna say no to this and no to that.

The key is give your kids a great, exciting social childhood. That's what kids need. And so if your kids have a gang, if they have just a few other kids that they can hang around with, they're probably gonna come out fine. So that's what you've done. We quote a play expert, Mariana Brussoni,

who says about playgrounds, kids need to be kept as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. And I quote a camp administrator who says something like, we want to see bruises, not scars. You know, if you run a camp or if you run a school and no one's ever injured on the playground, you're way too safe and your kids are not having any fun or adventure.

But part of it is liability. I used to babysit. I was so nervous for these kids. But for me, I got fired from a job, not them, but before, because I wouldn't let the kid go down the banister. The parents fired you for not letting them go down? Correct. Oh. So you love them.

They shouldn't have fired you. They should have just educated you. But also, no, I am not prepared to take this kid to the hospital and face a repercussion. I'm a babysitter, you know? So part of it is there's so much liability in camps and stuff and they don't want to get sued.

And these are realities too. That's right, especially in America. Yeah. And they have all the same problems in Canada and Australia and the UK. So of course you're right, the liability section makes everyone paranoid in this country. That is a real problem. But keeping your eye on having a fun, exciting childhood. This is one of the most fun aspects of the book is we go deep in chapter three on play and exploration into

research. There's a Norwegian play researcher, Ellen Sandstater. She says there are seven different kinds of thrills, high speeds, great heights, dangerous tools, hiding and getting lost. There are all these risks and kids are seeking them out. They're trying to get the right level of it because that's how you train your brain about where the borders are, what you're capable of. That's how you extend your abilities.

You definitely want to always do a safety inspection. You want to make sure there's nothing that can kill them, traffic, and then swimming pool. A lot of kids did used to die from drowning. Drowning is serious. That was the number one killer for kids under, yeah. You need to be very careful about drowning. But climbing a tree and falling out and getting scraped up

or possibly breaking an arm, that's something that should be a feature, not a bug, that there are risks. If my mom were here, she would make sure that this got said. Cause I was home and we were watching that documentary about the girl who got kidnapped. And the parents were at the dinner, sure that this got said because I was home and we were watching that documentary about the girl who got kidnapped and the parents were at the dinner just close by but the daughter

was in the hotel room. I don't remember this. It was like a big, it was in Europe. They left the kids in the hotel room. They went to dinner at the resort and then she got kidnapped or she's gone and they never found her. And so I was watching this with my mom and she was like, why'd they do that?

Why'd they go to the restaurant? I went out and played by myself all the time. I think she forgot, it's been a long time, but she was like, the risk isn't worth it. And that's what a lot of people would say. But I have a good counter to that. Go ahead. You're doing it all the time.

You're valuing one thing and taking on risk because you know it's worth it. So yes, one girl got abducted in Europe. 52,000 people are going to die this year in a car accident. So you're comparing the incident rate of an abduction versus dying in a car, and it's 50,000 to one. But we know we want what's on the other side of driving the car.

It is too important to miss out on your whole life to not go drive the car. You take on that risk because you want it. What people are not doing, I think accurately, is assessing what's at stake. So you know if you don't drive a car you're not going anywhere in your life. And if your kids don't have this sense of competence and autonomy, they're going to miss out on where the car takes you. What you're doing here is you're recapitulating the exact thing we started with about does moral judgment come from your gut or from your head and your calculations of that car. Exactly.

Am I the elephant or the rider? You are the rider. The rider is the small, the little. Yeah, but my mom is acting out of gut. Right. The gut response is why should you take any risk? Whereas if you think about it, you realize, wait, if I don't train my child how to take risk, I'm crippling this child. I'm creating a child that won't be able to deal

with the world. And that's what we've done. And if they get in a situation, they're actually far more vulnerable. So if your goal was to inoculate them from danger, them being as competent as possible is the best solution. That's right. And so here, let me just put in the term anti-fragility, one of the most powerful and important words, a word coined by Nassim Taleb, who was kind of a polymath, interesting, brilliant guy with some affiliation at New York University. And he pointed out there's a need for a word that describes systems that get better when they get challenged or threatened even. So the immune system is the classic example. If you protect your kid's immune system, you don't let any dirt or germs come

in, you're crippling it because the system is designed to learn from the challenges, learn from the dirt and germs that get in. And so it's the same thing here. Kids are anti-fragile and if you treat them like they're fragile, you don't want to take any risks, then you're blocking their development and just as they'll have autoimmune diseases, if you don't let them be exposed to dirt and germs, they'll have all kinds of psychological and anxiety related disorders if you don't let them. So I see where you're going with those statistical arguments, but I would urge more a vision of a positive life. Imagine your kid in two ways. In one, your kid is competent and confident,

and they go out there into the world and they're doing things. And the other, they're just always afraid because they think everything's risky. Which one do you want for your kid? Yeah, they've had no opportunity to find out they can handle stuff. Okay, well, I love all those solutions.

I've got no pushback on that. Now I'm going to hit you with something. You're not gonna like so And I'm gonna start this by saying I love my mother-in-law She's the greatest grandmother's ever been on planet Earth and no one loves my kids as much as my wife's mother But this is the pattern of texts I receive. Big warning about 5G. Huge dust up about vaccinations. She does not want us to get the kids vaccinated. A couple of abduction stories. And then out of nowhere, a month and a half ago, she texts me, have you heard of this guy, Jonathan Haidt? Uh oh. And she doesn't like me. No, she loves you. Links to things I should watch,

interviews you've given in the promotion of this book. And I respond to her, yes, I'm aware of him. I've interviewed him. What do you think of him? And I'm gonna be dead honest with you. I said, I think he's among the top five smartest people I've ever talked to. I'm very intimidated to argue with him.

And I think he himself is caught up in a bit of a moral panic. Ah, okay. Because you think what's happening to kids is not that serious. Here's what I think you're ignoring. Gen Z's teen pregnancy rate is 78% lower than 91. 31% of millennials drink regularly, only 18% of Gen Z's drink. A third of Gen Z doesn't even drink. This has never been observed.

They're completely abstinent. They are more frugal than millennials. They are more health conscious. They have better nutritional practices. They have better exercise. So where you going with this, Dex? Here's what I'm going with is like, you've decided to kind of focus on a singular thing. I could easily make the argument that yes, this obsession with social media and the phone,

although may have produced this thing, are we not then going to credit this thing with this huge leap forward this generation's taken? All this promising stuff we know about them. I know of the anxiety depression figure, but that's to me one metric out of like six and they're like thriving in the other departments. Well, you said they're thriving. That's an interesting- Improving. On a lot of the self-destructive metrics,

their behavior is better, that's all true. Now, does that mean they're thriving? Why are they not drinking? Why are they not driving cars? Why are they not dating? Why are they not getting pregnant? Why do you think it is? Because they're so wise, they decide,

you know what, these are risky. Because they're not with other people. They're not doing anything. If you're just on your bed all day long, scrolling through social media, then you're not going to be doing any of those things. So in chapter three of the book, I talk about a psychological dimension

of discover mode versus defend mode. And at any moment, our brains are such that we have a very, very quickly triggered withdrawal, fear, runaway, protect yourself mechanism, that's defend mode. And at any moment, our brains are such that we have a very, very quickly triggered, withdraw fear, run away, protect yourself mechanism that's defend mode. And so it's on a hair trigger any threat, we're in defend mode, we live in very safe worlds, and especially college or school is very safe. You want your kids to be in discover mode, you want them to look at something and say, what is that? That's an opportunity,

not a threat. And what seems to have happened a succinct way to describe the change from millennials to Gen Z, is the millennials were very much in discover mode. They liked to have fun, they liked to party, they liked to dance, be social. They were in discover mode. They had now much lower rates of teen pregnancy

than previous generations. Gen X, actually your generation, is actually the sickest in some ways. We have the highest suicide rate. Right, because you're the most lead poisoned. Lead was banned in the late 70s, early 80s. You're the most lead poisoned. Oh my God.

You are, no, serious, it's real. It's real. Millennials are the first unleaded generation. You guys were raised at a time when lead was really going down fast. But leaving that aside, if you imagine a whole generation being shifted from discover mode over to defend mode, you're going to see exactly the list you told me.

So sure, they're committing fewer crimes, they're not doing crazy stupid things. Oh, wait a second. You can find reel after reel of Gen Z influencers who die because they're doing something risky. The one that doesn't fit with that is they should have a big uptick in addiction, and especially drinking. Why? Because they're living these scared, unfulfilled, high anxiety, lonely, depressed lives. And it is an immediate medicine that has worked for millennia and that one doesn't jive. Well wait a second what percent of boys today would you say are free from addiction? Boys are rough, I'll grant it

that, but they're slightly improved shockingly. On drug addiction, but if we all agree that the central pathway is dopamine what percent of boys are dependent on external stimuli to give them dopamine? Through video games or? This includes video games, thinking porn, crypto betting, everything. What percent? I don't know.

Each of these, it tends to be somewhere between five and 10% develop what's called problematic use, compulsive, hard to stop, damages, other things. I've never seen a stat that lumped it all together because a lot of it is multi-addiction. If you are addicted to one dopamine thing, and Lemke says you're more at risk for other dopamine addictions.

So if you add it all up, I don't know, but one thing that we are seeing is that at the upper end of the income, if you look at the richest families, you look at the smartest kids in school, they're often not down very much, but you look at the bottom quarter, whether it's by test scores or by social class,

they are dropping much faster, especially for boys. Well, they need more salve. They're also the most exposed to digital addictions. They spend more time on their devices. They're more likely to be spending four, five, six hours a day on video games. So sure, you can show me a couple of stats that are down, but I see these as actually symptoms

of a much larger malaise, which is the shift over to defend mode. So what troubles me about my mother-in-law's text is she didn't text me to say you should let your kids roam freer. Oh, you should be aware of all these other threats. Fear is very tasty. It's very viral.

It's easy to latch onto. And so my issue is that what she could have just as equally gotten from your book is that she should have called and said, you know what, you should let the kids go out to eat by themselves. Now that's the part of the book I love, and I do think it's the antidote, but that's not what makes headlines

and that's not what has my mother-in-law texting me. It's not the call to bravery that I would want it to be. It's a double down on more fear. Is she really afraid of digital addictions for your kids? Terrified. You got to get every phone out of the house, just off to the races. Yeah. It's a moral panic if it's not true. It's a moral panic if this is spread by news reports only. One reason this is not a moral panic is that parents are not responding to the book because they read an article about a kid who got addicted. It's because they've seen it, if not in their own kids,

then their nieces and nephews or in their friends' kids. Everyone has seen this. As you said earlier, Monica, like we see it in ourselves. We can't handle all this stuff. Well, the most identifiable thing is the endless arguments that exist in a household about this topic. Any parent can relate to this. Exactly.

So it's not a moral panic. It is really happening. And this is why the book is doing so well around the world. Whenever it comes out in a country, I don't have to go to the country, just some parents read it and say, oh my God, yes, because all over the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. Yeah. None of us asked for this.

We all hate it. We can see what it's doing to our kids because there is an academic debate as to whether social media is causing it or not. And some people are acting like, well, until we're sure, until we have proof, we shouldn't do anything. But when we're talking about kids, it should be the opposite. It should be

if there's a credible reason to think that this is harmful, we're not sure yet, maybe, but it looks like it. And the cost of keeping them off for a few years is zero. They're not missing anything. If all they have is flip phones. I don't think that this is in any way a moral panic. What I'm offering is an explanation of the concerns that are almost universally shared by parents

once they see their kids on devices. I'm in an interesting zone because I agree with you. I don't want a phone in my kid's school. They're not gonna be on social media until they're older. They're just not good. The phones. The phones. As I always tell my kids, I'm like, the world is so big around you and to reduce it to two

by three inches, that's not what we should be doing. We should be trying to make it even wider, not narrower. So I'm just in an interesting zone with it because I agree with you, but I think there's a little bit of hysteria surrounding it. I also don't think it's Satan. I don't think evil's here. You can maybe accept that. You're afraid of extremes in general.

I'm afraid of panics, irrational panics and fear. I'm afraid of irrational panics too, but what if it is rational? Let me just make the case this way. So first let me say, you're in a privileged position in that your kids have a group, very few kids have a group that they can see socially and have fun with. Your kids are having a normal human childhood.

And it is that any parents out there that are listening, work as hard as you can to find other kids that your kids can hang out with without supervision. It's very important that they be unsupervised because that's the way that they learn to be self-supervising. So that is fantastic what you're doing. Now as for whether this is something where we need to respond urgently or maybe this is just kind of a problem and we should study it more and not act hastily, that's I think your position. Are you open also to the notion that there are these cycles with new generations that are unavoidable, which is I have some hope that this self-corrects

simply because the next generation will observe these older kids doing this outdated thing, and it'll just be passe and not cool. Facebook went away for young people. It's because they moved to Instagram. I agree. And then TikTok and then something else. But I have some hope that this will be a dumb,

embarrassing activity that the older people did. That is possible. And I'm in the older people did. That is possible. And I'm in the position of saying, this time is different. Now, in previous moral panics, people said this time is different too. So I understand that I could be wrong. But I think the effects of this technology, it's especially the touchscreen, the quick stimulus response,

and then the super connection, not direct connection, but mediated by algorithm for for-profit companies. My argument is this is different. First of all, this is global. That hasn't happened before. This is accompanied by an instant increase in all kinds of mental illness, which didn't happen with television or anything else.

This is something that the kids themselves recognize. With television, there was a moral panic, but my sisters and I were watching I Dream of Jeannie and the Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy and we loved it. We had the reservations about it, but Gen Z does. We did a survey. One question is, do you wish this technology had never been invented? And for Instagram, it was 35% say they wish it was never invented. For TikTok, 48% say they wish it was never invented. They feel trapped. So this is not like previous moral panics. Secondly, part of the reason I'm rushing with such urgency here that we have to act quickly is that AI is coming in faster than anyone realizes. We think

chat GPT will get a little smart. No. The AI friends are coming in. Soon the AI girlfriends will be implanted in robots. What's coming at kids is so far beyond what we can imagine. And the principle so far from the early days of the internet, our children are the same as adults. Anyone can be any age on the internet. There is no age. Everyone can do everything. That's been the rule.

We have more than a hundred years of experience in the real world saying, you know, we want adults to be able to drink and smoke, but we don't want kids to be doing it. We want adults to have sex, but we don't want kids to be doing it, you know, with strangers. Driving.

Driving, right. We've accepted the principle in the real world that kids are not adults. Online, we have not yet accepted the principle in the real world that kids are not adults. Online, we have not yet accepted that principle and AI is coming, not five years from now. Well, they're gonna have companions that will not challenge them to ever change who they are. They're character AI, they already have it.

So we've already had several encounters with this. We already let social media get to our kids early and this has been, I believe, a disaster. What's the likelihood that when our kids now have all these AI friends that are so great, so praising, no problems. There'll be the highest status member of that group. The odds that this is gonna be good for them are so slim. That's why I do really feel like a man on a mission

that we have to fix this this year, 2025, because by 2026, 27, the AI, the rate of increase, the arrival of artificial general intelligence, the degree to which our lives will be run by agents. So we do have to act quickly. I don't think we can say, well, you know, we need more study. The proposals that I'm making cost approximately $0.

Yeah. Again, I'm in favor of every proposal. So let's just do them. Yes, there's a chance that I'm wrong. There's a chance that this was actually caused by some weird plastic that was introduced in 2012 all over the world at the same time. It hit girls more than boys. It hit 2.0.

Exactly, so that could be true. I can't be certain that I'm right about this. It's a zero risk proposition. No one's gonna look back in time and be like, well, fuck Jonathan Haidt. We could have been on the phone seven hours a day and we were only on it one hour a day. No one will ever regret spending less time.

When the TikTok ban was happening. Yeah, I was excited. I know, I was like, oh my God, good. We didn't see protests among Gen Z because they don't want to be the only one kicked off. Yes. But they would like it to disappear. Yeah, I was like, go ahead, take them all.

Take Instagram, take them. They're a pox on humanity. Look at it this way. These companies are worth trillions of dollars collectively. How much money do they make from each of us? How much did you pay them? I've paid them zero. Yeah. Look at it this way. These companies are worth trillions of dollars collectively. How much money do they make from each of us? How much did you pay them? I've paid them zero. Yeah, exactly.

So where do the trillions of dollars of value come from? From sucking out our kids' attention and selling it and their data. That's it. Well, John, then sincerely, it is an enormous privilege to get your time. I admire you greatly. I think you're such a special intellectual and I'm glad

that you're passionate about this. I may not have the fear level you do, but it's a true honor and a privilege that we get to sit and talk with you. Agree. Well, thank you, Dax and Monica. It was really fun. The last time we spoke, things have gotten a lot rougher and weirder since 2018. But I think there is a growing awareness of the problems. I have my concerns about the directions of American democracy. When it comes to what's happening to our kids, what I've seen since the book came out in March makes me so hopeful

that around the world, parents and especially mothers are really leading the charge. Parents are rising up saying enough is enough. So I think we are actually going to solve this. The book is huge. I mean, it's on every list I see. It was on Bill's list. My mother-in-law is like foreign to me. Yeah, I mean, you've penetrated.

All right, well, thank you so much. And I hope you'll come back on your next book. Love to. Okay, great to talk with you guys. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. Hello. Hi. You couldn't find your tabs? No, so I have a Word. I keep them in Word.

Okay. But it's not there. That's what you use to write to compose things is Word? Yeah. Oh, you had to download that program, I guess, right? It doesn't come on a Mac. Well, they have Word for Mac. I don't know this I didn't have to download it for this newer laptop But you transferred everything from your old laptop on that one. I think I did. Oh you did. Okay got it

I use text edit because it came with it Cool, no, I'm feeling like I should have gone the extra mile and gotten the same Give her use Google Docs. I Don't like it's great. same, probably. Do you ever use Google Docs? I don't like, it's great. Okay. But I prefer to have something I don't have to log into if I lose a password. This has happened multiple times.

Yeah, yeah. Where I get locked out, then I can't access the docs or any of these things. It never ends with the passwords. Who would have thought that would be the bane of everyone's existence? I know. I just had a bit of a scare.

So as you know, Erin and I are starting a podcast. Yeah, so tell, what's the deal? Yeah, I think it's gonna be called Mom's Car, and I am in real life, I've registered to deliver food, for a delivery service, popular delivery service, I'll leave it at that. And we go pick up and deliver food. And then while we're driving around,

we read questions people ask, and then in this case, we did a couple last night, we also had a fun guest in the backseat. Nice. But registering for this delivery app, it was like my social security, like info I never give out online. Yeah.

And I was like, God, now I gotta trust this company to not have a data breach, which they all have them. I know. I know, I was scared. That is scary. What was really, really funny about this whole thing was I delivered for three hours, didn't get much activity. I thought it would be like boom, boom, boom,

but of course we're in LA, a lot of out of work actors. I think there's a lot of folks delivering food. I only got to deliver three different meals in three hours. Ice cream, some smoothie beverages, and some hot chicken. Nice. And it was very, very fun. All to say, I made $22.

Congrats. And then I got home and I ordered food for everyone that was at the house, which we have people staying at the house, and I spent like $180. I was like, oh, this is so funny. I offset, I guess, my expenditure by $22. So do you only get the tip?

You get some fee for delivering that. Okay. And then you get a tip, but that comes in a little while later. One thing that wasn't in any of the questionnaires, which should be, my first delivery, the person was on the fifth floor of an apartment building, no elevator.

Oh, fuck. So I had to hook it up five, I'm exaggerating, it was four, I didn't need to do that, four is a lot. I thought they should ask if you're in shape. Yeah. I don't think, and not everyone can go hustle up four flights of stairs to drop off some food. Well, they might have to take breaks.

It could take a while. Yeah. And then you could be losing your mind inside your apartment, because you saw that they've arrived, and it's like still 20 minutes. Sure. Yeah.

And then I only got to meet one of the customers because most people, which I didn't anticipate, which makes sense, just leave at the door. People want leave at the door. You're leave at the door? Yes. Yeah. I have to interact with them

because I got to open the gate and do the whole thing. Well, even when I order here, I tell them leave it at the gate. You're not worried that some of the scoundrels out there are going to dip into it? Of course. I am worried, but not worried enough to... To deal with meeting the person? Yeah, that's fun.

It is. It's very fun. Cool, well, I have good news. I have an update. My cholesterol's down. It is. How significantly? I don't know. We're gonna talk about it,

but Dr. Richard Isaacson, our friend, who we, our doctor. Our savior, our Lord and savior. Yes, we did another round of blood draw. So much blood. So much blood again. No shade to the experiment we're involved with, but my God, there's 10 vials of blood, right?

That's what they took, 10? Yep. I didn't count, but it was a lot. It was 10. It was 10, yeah. And then finger pricks, so 20 cards. So it's like you got the 10 vials of blood and then all these cards. It was 10. It was 10, yeah. And then finger pricks, 20 cards. So it's like you got the 10 vials of blood and then all these cards.

Yeah, a lot of blood. He just texted me, he said, yay. And I was like, oh, what's going on? And he just said, yay again. And I said, oh, is it working? And he said, yeah. Because you've gone on a... I'm on the statin.

You are? Okay, great. Yes, I'm on the statin. You are? Okay, great. Yes, I'm on the statin and I'm on half of the dose I was prescribed and I wanted to see if that was gonna be enough. Right. And it seems like it is. He sent me a positive text too.

It said that I've knocked out whatever inflammation was in one of my vessels or some shit. Oh, good. Did you get any good news, Rob? No. Let's be called bad news coming. I'm sorry. Oh, I brought news, Rob? No, let's be honest. Bad news is coming. I'm sorry. Oh, I brought my, speaking of that,

I brought my smell test. You did. Yeah. Do you wanna do some or no? I hate my smell test. What do you mean? Of all the tests we have to do again, I'm mad that I have to redo this smell test.

Well, that's why it's fun to do it this way. I just think so much, just like scratching. Well, we can try it. Wanna do a couple cards? I know we do a couple cards. Okay, I just don't wanna, to redo this smell test. Well, that's why it's fun to do it this way. I just think so much, she's like scratching. Well, we can try it. Wanna do a couple cards? I know we do a couple cards. Okay, I just don't wanna, it's a long test. So part of our study is we have to complete the smell test. I wonder if our first page is the same first page.

Oh, that's a good question. Are your options A gasoline B pizza peanuts? Okay, lilac. Yep. Okay, we're gonna scratch our thing. Okay. I Hate this test Oh This was harder than the last one. I always wonder like did I get old cards? No, I'm just gonna be honest with you, I don't have an answer. It's this process of elimination,

I don't think I smelt gasoline, I don't wanna skew your results. I'll let you lock in before. I have one locked, I think. All right, I'm gonna lock in mine too. But I don't really, I didn't smell this. I just want you to know, I didn't smell the other things more. Okay, what'd you pick?

Peanuts. Oh, fuck, I picked lilac. You smell lilac? Yeah. You smell peanuts? It smells floral. I don't smell peanuts, but I know I don't smell lilac, pizza, or gasoline. Oh, I have an idea.

Let me smell yours. Oh, really good. We can, we have a control group, kind of. Yeah, it's the same smell. Oh, fuck, I hate this test. Well, now you've heard our things. I hope he says pizza. I did for a second think that.

That would have been my second, because of oregano. Thank you, it doesn't smell like anything. It smelled like the lead from my pencil. I think it's lilac though. Okay, so I got that one wrong. But we don't know. We do.

You guys are better at this than me. Okay, I can concede defeat when I'm defeated. I can take the loss. All right, here we go. Number two. Okay, that one's easy. We're gonna agree on this one. Okay, I'm gonna lock nine in.

On the count of three. One, two, three, see. Bubble gum. Ah! It is bubble gum. Ah! It is bubble gum, fuck. I gotta change it. Oh no, don't change it. You know what it was?

No, I need to and I feel ethically fine about it. I smelt gum. Yeah. I smelt gum, I'm like, ooh, gum. But then I went, oh, winter green's a flavor of gum. Yeah. But I didn't even read bubble gum. That was hasty.

I didn't even read it. Okay, let hasty. I didn't even read it. Okay, let's do one more. Okay, hold on. Pfft. Yep. On the count of- Wait, I'm not ready. Okay.

No, hold on. You, it hurts so bad. I'm hasty. This should be a test of how, maybe this is just a test of how hasty you are. Three, two, one, D. Menthol, yes, D, finally. Finally. Although we did agree on the last one,

I just didn't read all the options. All right, let's do a fourth one, now I like it. Okay. Oh, I hope this is D. Me too. It's my favorite smell. I think it's D too. And it is.

Don't do that. But yeah. It is. It's cherry for the listener. For the listener, the options were whiskey, honey, lime, cherry, and of all four of those smells, I would most want to smell cherry. Okay, so what's interesting already,

I know me and you are doing this much differently. I don't look at them. Okay. I do my thing, I smell first before I see the options. See, I go, I don't wanna be trying to pinpoint what smell I'm smelling. I'd rather know what four options are and then I'll be much quicker to latch it onto one.

Do you think this is like revealing of our personalities? Maybe. But like if I just smell a smell, oh, I don't know, it's a fruit, it's a fuck, I know it's a fruit, is it this? It could take me forever to get to kiwi or cherry, but if I see it on there. Yeah, but you can also be misled that way,

like you were with wintergreen. See, I didn't read them. Well, you read them with peanuts. That's why I just learned the hard, I did read that one and I didn't get it. All right, I don't know. But I didn't read them before, and I was like, gum, wintergreen.

So I would have been better off reading all of them before. Let's do one last one, because it's fun. Oh, I hope it's D. No. Please be D, please be D. Fuck me, and this one's a head scratcher. But I think I have a, I have a hidden eye on. Fuck this, it's not in there.

Stop being so patchy. I hate this test so much. I hate you Dr. Isaacson. Oh my God. You're the worst. You are such a baby test taker. All right, this is like, again, the least. Yeah, I agree that this one isn't like that obvious. Okay, on three, three, two, one, A.

Motor oil, oh. Mine went grass. The options were grass, pizza, motor oil, and pineapple. And for the listener, you're probably thinking, how the fuck is it not clear? Yes, those are such different smells, but I'm telling you, nothing came off this piece of paper. I am questioning.

Okay, Rob, do you wanna come smell this one? There's nothing there, Rob, you're wasting your footsteps. Don't, stop doing that. He knows. Stop doing that. Yeah, maybe you should just try. Yeah, smell mine and see if you agree with me. There's nothing, there's absolutely nothing there.

There's no scent. I don't even think a dog. Yes. Yeah, it is, but that's not an option. Like grass? No, grass. Minty like grass? I don't care about this one.

Like, I don't care if. I don't know. Minty like grass? I don't care about this one. Like I don't care if my smells in decline. I take a lot of pride in how strong my nose is. Yeah. It could be a blessing really to not be able to smell. Famously my dad couldn't smell anything because he broke his nose so many times and he got a nose job. Couldn't smell anything.

House could be on fire, he wouldn't smell it. And we'd be watching TV and I would fart sometimes and it would be so stinky and I'm like, oh my God, he has no clue. Oh, that part's nice. That part's nice. It's dangerous if there's a propane leak, I suppose. You continue, Dawn.

Sorry, I just. It's hard for me to stop halfway in the test. You love this test. Yeah, I would imagine. I did a fun dad thing this morning. Oh, what'd you do? I woke up at 5.30, which I wasn't grateful for, but then I was like, ah, whatever, just get up.

And I had done all the stuff I needed to do, and I looked and I was like, oh, it's like, it's 6.30. I wonder if I shake the girls awake if they'll want to go get breakfast before. Ooh, before school. Before school, and Lincoln's already up. Lincoln is my daughter. She was, she's up at six.

They're both your daughters. Yep, they're both my daughters, to my knowledge. I guess I'll never know, unless we all do a 23andMe. But she's up at six, she goes and lets Whiskey out, and then she goes into the backyard, she goes up to the top to a swing to, oh, she journal out, and then she goes into the backyard, she goes up to the top to a swing. Oh, she journaled first, then she went in the backyard, got on a swing, got a little peacetime perspective.

Then I saw her walking through the backyard at like 6.30, and then I open up the cameras and I see her, she goes up to the gym. Oh! So she's fucking journaled, she basically meditated, she went and sat on a swing. Right. And then she went to the gym and did some squats.

Oh, wow. This shit is just so genetic, right? No one's telling, no one's encouraging her to do any of this stuff. No one's encouraging, okay, but this is, it could equally be not genetic. As you just said, you're doing all those things. Well, I'm modeling it.

I just, yes, yes. In fact, for me, that's more of an indication that all that's nurture. I just think it's interesting that one of them does this stuff. Yes, it's been modeled. Both versions have been modeled by Kristin and I, but one happens to constantly replicate the modeling.

Kristin did, and one is constantly replicating the modeling I've done, which I just find suspicious. If it were a little more blurry, like a little more of each person. And you're right, maybe I'm projecting. Anyways, here's this fucking girl, she's doing her whole, she's got a routine at 11, right? Yeah, yeah.

So anyways, so Delta's still asleep. Again, Kristen versus me, Kristen will always sleep longer than I will. So I sneak in there and I shake Delta awake. And I'm nervous waking someone up because it can make you grumpy. Yeah, it can. I give her a little shake and I go,

you wanna go to breakfast before school? And she goes, yeah, absolutely. And so I tiptoe out of the room, they're all ready. And then I'm like, to the errands, the errands are visiting. So I'm like, you guys wanna go to breakfast? Yeah, I didn't think Weekly would be up, but he was up. And then we get in the car and then all of a sudden,

Belle runs out. She had a late enough call. Oh yeah. So we had a party breakfast. There was five of us at breakfast. No, six of us at breakfast. The whole Northeast Police Department, the division of the LAPD, that's Northeastern,

they all went to breakfast. They took up all these tables, they were right next to us, and Delta was like, oh, that's the gun, I haven't seen a gun in real life. They just have their gun on. And then the guy overheard it, and he's like, yeah, this is where we keep our gun. And then she's like, what else is in your thing?

And he's giving her, you know, here are my handcuffs. I go, do you have Narcan? Yeah, here's my Narcan. Whole interactive field trip, basically to a police station. That's cool. Yeah, they gave them stickers. Oh, cute.

Yeah. Cute. Yeah, that was fun. What did the sticker look like? LAPD. White with a blue? Gold. Gold. Gold.

Gold and shiny. I was like, if you wear those to school, which they put them on their thing, I'm like, people are gonna think you're a narc. Oh, shit. 21 Jump Street. They're not gonna tell you any secrets anymore. No, a narc.

Is an undercover. Yeah, that wouldn't be undercover. That's true. That's over cover. Okay, that's overt. They'll be an over cover cop. O over cover. Okay, that's overt. They'll be an over cover cop. Overt cover. Well, that's cute.

That's a fun way to kick off the weekend. It was very, very fun. And everyone got to school on time. It all worked out beautifully. Breakfast before school, that never happened to me. Neither. A lot of my friends' parents did that. They did.

It's such a fun tree. I know. Yeah. It's a really sweet thing to do. I brought this up in what will be an upcoming episode, but I watched Shane Gillis' special last night. What led to that last night? We've had a couple people on who are in comics.

Yeah. And- Arena comics. Arena comics, and I do think people- Lumped them all into one category. At least two of them, at least Shane and one of them, into one category. At least two of them, at least Shane and one of them into one category. And then I remember when his special came out,

everyone was watching it and loving it, but also like, it's like edgy, it's risky. And a few people had told me that like, I shouldn't watch it, I wouldn't like it. So I didn't. And then because we've been in this sort of world for a week or so with these comics, and it's brought up a lot of questions and things,

and me and you have gotten into a couple things about it, and I was editing that. Oh, uh-huh. After I was like, hmm, I wanna watch Shane and see what I think about that. Yeah. And I thought it was so great. I wanna watch Shane and see what I think about that. And I thought it was so great. And so funny and good.

And then I was like, huh. I, of course, on face value, or like, maybe not face value, but on the surface, first of all, understand how they're lumped together. value or like, maybe not Facebook, but like on the surface. First of all, understand how they're lumped together. And secondly, understand why, to me, why it would be like, maybe that's not for you. To me. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, he's doing an impersonation of someone with Down syndrome. A lot of people are, that's a big no-no for a lot of people. Yes, but I have seen his monologue already. So, well, and then he explains it immediately that he has a lot of people. Yes, but I have seen his monologue already, and then he explains it immediately, that he has a lot of family who has Down syndrome, and he also has started a business. There's a lot of reasons why I was not offended by that.

Why he gets a pass. Exactly. But for a lot of people, that's a deal breaker. There's no going beyond that. Yeah, that's probably true for a lot of people. It's why I think Chappelle also gets a lot of passes for a lot of things he says. He's lived going beyond that. Yeah, that's probably true for a lot of people. It's why I think Chappelle also gets a lot of passes for a lot of things he says. He's lived a life that-

But by the way, that was my defense of one of these arena comedians, which is like, in the same way Shane's family members have this and he's immersed in it, like this person who's making these jokes has almost no white friends. I know, but I don't think it's the same, personally. I think you are allowed to make jokes about your family,

because something connected to your family or you. But if you, I mean, you wouldn't, because you know me, but if you went and felt like you could go to an Indian accent because of your proximity to me, I would say probably not. Right, but one thing I'll say, here's an example where it does happen in real life. So I run into Pari, our neighbor,

I think we've already said this, and he tells me, you've gotta tell Monica to move her porta potty. And I go, I'll tell her, but she's Indian, Pari. She's stubborn. She ain't gonna listen to a thing I say. I've earned the right to say that. I'm close to you.

I'm making a joke about Indian people being stubborn. And it's honky-dory. I feel fine about it. Pari loved it. Well, Pari's Indian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Pari's Indian. If you had said that to a white neighbor, I wouldn't have liked it.

Well, I wouldn't have said it because it wouldn't make any sense to them. But Pari knows what that means. Exactly. And this, what you're saying right now is my entire point. There is a lot of nuance in what is offensive and what is not. But you would agree it's not objective.

It's just like, we're all in some continuum. Yeah. And for you the down-sum thing didn't bomb. For other people it totally does. Yes. And that's just where they're at on the continuum. Well, sure, there's a continuum, but there is also a, there's a reality in comedy math

about who is getting made fun of. And sometimes, yes, on the surface, if someone's doing an accent, it's like, why are they doing the accent? Is it for, like when you were telling me the story about Pari, you were starting to do it in his accent as you were being him. That is different than you just going into a room

and doing a generic Indian accent for no reason just to get a laugh. There is a difference. And so, yeah, I guess I was really sitting with that of, there's so much, I think people think everyone's just offended by everything, but, and some people are, I'm not, I don't know, but it's specific, and for me, anyway.

But I think the thing that came up in that interview, which is really, really important, and I do stand by this point, which is like, it's not okay in a school where everyone's white and there's five minorities. It's totally fine in the inner city when the white kids don't have a majority and everyone's just teasing each other, which is a fine thing everyone can agree to.

And everyone can enjoy it if they enjoy it. Yeah, if people enjoy it and are in on it. And so my defense of the one person is like, yes, if he's just a guy who doesn't have any friends and isn't in a group where they're all teasing each other, if he's out there doing it, that is a different thing to me than someone who's growing up with predominantly all minority friends

and everyone's blasting each other. That is a totally different situation and the people that enjoy it have to be allowed to enjoy it. Sure, I'm not telling anyone they can't like something or whatever, I'm just telling you what I think is smart comedy and what isn't, if I'm being odd. I think people like Chappelle and I think Shane did this

in his special, they are doing kind of wild, saying wild things. Oh my God, rooting for Al-Qaeda. Being very provocative. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But they're not. If you really listen to what they're saying, they are making fun of the hegemonic group

and all of these things. Or if you're making fun of fucking Al-Qaeda, most people aren't gonna be upset about that. I mean, you might be like, oh my God, he's saying provocative things. He's saying 9-11, he's saying I'm rooting for them. He's saying this, but when you really, you're like, oh yeah, he is making fun of terrorists.

Most people don't think they need to be, you need to stick up for them. They're not a marginalized group. They don't think they need to be, you know, you need to stick up for them. They're not a marginalized group. They don't have a lobby. Exactly, they're not a group that people feel they need to like get behind. Same, yeah. Yeah, those really, really smart comedians

are Trojan horsing a positive message into the world under this kind of provocative nature, and I think that is brilliant. And I think we all to some degree see ourselves in the things we're watching. So like I recognize all those things to be true about Shane that you just said. And also I look at him and I go,

oh, the fun for me is more everyone is so quick and needs to find out whether the comedian they're listening to is on the left or the right. It's imperative. They must figure it out if they're gonna enjoy this. And he is bouncing both directions throughout the whole thing. And it begs of you to be a little more comprehensive

in how you're judging the thing. It's almost like the fun challenge, which I really appreciate. Yeah, he seems cool. I think I really love this scene. And also, he got famous first for getting canceled. I know, the Asian stars. Which is gonna immediately bring over one side.

Ish, but if you do like five minutes of a look into it, and he apologized for that too and he said look there's so much of me out there there's gonna be big misses that was a big miss yeah so that was that was a fun little deep dive I got I did I'm due to watch it again now that we're talking about it yeah it was good stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. I guess this is sort of in keeping because this is for Jonathan Haidt. Oh yeah.

And I saw his book again pop up on something. It's like still number two. Yeah. It is a success. Okay, but the Cannibal Cookbook. Okay. That's Nico Clow. Nico Clow. Nico Clow.

Nico Clow. C-L-A-U-X. I feel guilty because I know I would have pronounced it Clow-x, but you already told me it was clow. Well, I just said that LeBeau, my maiden name, Yeah. used to be L-A-B-E-A-U-X. Yeah.

Yeah, and then it became L-A-B-O. So he murdered and robbed and according to him. According to him. He murdered and robbed and eight people. But there is record of him being in prison. Yeah, but like not for very long. 12 years? Seven.

Seven. Which feels like a little bit. It feels too short of a prison term for murder. For a murder. But these other countries have different approaches than we do. That is true. Yeah.

You're right. You could kill someone and make your tea time next week. I just really liked this phrase that I had never heard about two types of people. There are two types of people, those who say there are two types of people and those who don't. I really liked that.

Yeah, it's clean. Yeah. It's really clean. I had AI give me moral dumbfoundings. Oh. Because I wanted to give me moral dumbfoundings. Oh! Because I wanted to do one every episode with Aaron. Because he and I have such loosey goosey morals, I thought it'd be kind of fun to hear us

process some of these things. There's a bunch. Do you want to hear one? Yeah. The Clone Replacement, they have titles. Okay. A couple's young child dies in an accident, overwhelmed with grief, they secretly have the child cloned

and raise the clone as if nothing happened. They never tell the child or anyone else. Is this morally wrong? Why? Oh, wow. So I have to first imagine, because I'm gonna wade through this. I find this out tomorrow.

About a friend? About me. Oh. So I find out tomorrow, my parents had a Dax already, he died, they cloned me, and my honest feeling is I'm so moved by that. They loved me so much they needed another one of me. I would feel fine about that.

I wouldn't feel moved, but I feel fine. Right? It doesn't bother me. It's just they double demonstrated they wanted you. Yeah, I mean, I think I, you know, growing up and being more and more, seeing your parents as real people and being a little critical of them,

I guess I would more be like, they were not able to go through a grief like that, or they didn't think they were going to be able to, so they did this. Weirdly, that doesn't have anything to do with me, Monica, now, like I wouldn't think, oh no, I wasn't real. Or I wasn't. Yeah, I wouldn't think any of that.

So I cannot find who the victim in this scenario is. That's why I wanted to start with pretending I'm the cloned person. Right. So I don't see a victim. I guess I would say morally it's okay. Yeah. But yeah, and again, the stakes couldn't be higher,

so it's a good question. Yeah. Because I feel like we all experience pain, and then sometimes good things come out of it. Right. But like losing a kid, what could possibly come out of that that's positive. So I mean, yeah.

Yeah, like if the goal in life is to figure out how to not be in deep sorrow over that, that's a bizarre goal to have. Right, but I guess then, is it like then you really can't feel anything again? I wonder how it will impact you in your life as the person, the parent. Well, I think for the parent, it'd be really tricky

because of course I go like, okay, if I lost Lincoln, would I try to get her back? Yeah. Obviously. Yeah. What would be kind of unfair to Lincoln 2.0 is that I have an expectation of who she is. And how flexible could I be when this 2.0 isn't 1.0? So I think you'd have to go into it with a real rigid game plan of like, I refuse to try to make her

the same person, I have to let her be whoever she is. Which is already the original challenge of being a parent. So it's actually not a new challenge, which is you've got to try your hardest to let them be who they are, which is the big battle. But also, again, I don't think any parent could really, if they're thinking about their own kid, could see it this way.

But you and I have talked about this when we, we've sometimes talked about other people who've gone through horrible, horrible tragedies of having like a child die of a disease or something. I know dudes who are sober and they don't relapse and I'm like so blown away. Right. But you've also said like your best self

would just be so grateful to have had that time. That's what I would. That's your highest self would just be so grateful to have had that time. That's what I would. That's your highest self. And more importantly, I would really feel like I was dishonoring her to not be so grateful I got the time I got with her. That's like the weird moral position I have about it is like, I can't to be anything but grateful

for every moment I had with her. Is like dishonoring her. Well then is it dishonoring her by replacing her? Yeah, you're right. Like this new her, even though she's cloned is not her. She's well right, she's gonna eat different foods at different times and be at different spots on the planet. We also just have, there's just so much more to us

than our DNA and our flesh. Like we have an essence, we have a thing and that isn't, you can't replicate that. I also wondered too, this bond and trust I have with her, it would be easy to think I just have it when the new baby arrive. And the bond and trust I have with her, it would be easy to think I just have it when the new baby arrived. But I probably forget how much I earned

along the way of that bond and trust. Yeah, for sure. That is now mine and I can feel. But at the beginning, I was earning. I was saying, welcome. Yeah, well you would do that again. I'm your friend. Yeah, I would do that again.

I guess you could assume you have a relationship you don't. That would be interesting. In benefit of the doubt and all these things that grow over time. She sees me admit when I'm wrong enough times that she trusts me. But the first one, the new one 2.0, wouldn't have seen that.

Is the new one the age of, would it come as a baby? No, it'd have to come as a baby. Okay, so then you would do all the same things. Yeah. But then that to me is, if it comes as a baby. And then if you're just repeating everything. That's the thing. Is that a performance?

I think maybe if it's a baby, it's maybe dishonoring the original kid. There's some things I wouldn't do that I learned. Right. The 2.0 would get a little bit better of an experience Like I had to learn along the way some yeah, of course lessons, but then I guess it sort of it's like then Why not have another baby? That's not her

But is just a good have her I mean that's but it's not I guess that's what it really so it's like It's not it's not her. Yeah you believe, like I don't believe that. I don't think a clone, even though it's technically a clone. It is her. It's technically her. It's not an identical twin. Exactly. It's a clone.

It's her. I think there are just too many factors. Although that is the same as an identical twin. There are just our factors in life that will make that person different. We live in a different house, I have a different job, we have a different level of means. There's a lot has changed in 12 years.

Yeah, maybe there's something like that person had a complete, they didn't, in my opinion, because I don't really, you know, that's hard for me to like wrap my head around, but there was a beginning and an end to that. And then to like kind of fuck with that feels maybe wrong to that original person, I don't know. But again.

But that person's dead. Yeah, and if I found out like I'm dead and my parents wanted me back, I don't, I would feel very loved. But it's not you. Somebody else get, it's a new Dax. But they wanted me back. I know,, I feel very loved. Somebody else get, it's a new DACS. But they wanted me back. I know. The message is still very nice.

They all, well yeah, but don't you, obvious. Some people be like, let's try a different combination. Now, the study on how much time kids are spending on the phone in schools is yeah, one and and a half hours on average a school day, with 25% of students logging on for more than two hours. Now what my question is, is has note passing gone down by an hour and a half a day? Because I passed notes at least an hour and a half a day,

probably three, or drew pictures and handed the pictures I drew to Erin. So I do wonder if that, has that gone down? Maybe, but that's- Is it just offsetting this other disruptive behavior? I think it's not about disruptive behavior, it's about social isolation. Yeah, I think it's better for you to pass notes.

Yeah. But I think if you just, I think a lot of people will just go like, oh my God, they're just wasting an hour and a half of their day that they could be educated. I'm just saying explore that a little more. Everyone's missing an hour and a half a day. We always have been.

We just might have been doing different things. And then you could say, which things are better for you? And I would agree no, passing is better. But I don't think missing an hour and a half of instruction is new. No, I don't either. I don't even know if that, maybe for that study, that's the point, but I think Jonathan Haidt would say

it's not like the problem is just being isolated. Passing notes and stuff is right a passage. Part of school, it's part of growing up. It's the best part of the whole experience. Yeah, it's fun. You're just w waiting through the instructions so you can be passing notes to friends. I know.

Did you pass in the hallway too? Oh, did girls? You would pass in the hallway. Oh, I'd write love letters to Randy during class and then I'd see her in the hallway and I'd make out with her for a second and then I'd leave her with a note. We used to also pass, we had like slam books.

I can see your handwriting in my head. Aw, that's cute. Like, immediately we had like slam books. I can see your handwriting in my head. Aw, that's cute. Like, immediately. You had slam books. Yeah, we didn't call them that. Okay. But like, you'd have like one, you'd have one with like these two girls

and you'd all get together and you'd make the composition book and you like cut out all these things from magazines and you tape it on and then you tape the whole book. So the whole book is covered in like a particular design that you've made. Is it positive or is it, slam book sounds like you're tearing people down.

That's not the right phrase. No, it's like I would cut out this like picture of Britney Spears and then they'd cut out a thing that says way cool. But like, that's just the front, that's just the cover. Then throughout the day, you take turns with the book. So you'll write in it and then you'll pass to your friend and they'll write in it, then they pass to the other.

The thing is you'd end up having like a lot of books. Because you have different groups. Who got to keep them though? Because they were communal. It's rotated. It's just rotated. Do you know the term slam piece? That made me think of that.

I have heard of that. Yeah. Slam rotated. Do you know the term slam piece? That made me think of that. I have heard of that. Yeah. Slam books. That was a word. Slam book I think is what's maybe used in Mean Girls. We didn't call it that, but that's. I just had a thought you're gonna hate. Okay.

I'm considering not participating in this part of the experiment. It just occurred to me like, maybe I just go, no, I don't want to do the smell test. Okay. I just had that thought, like, do I have to do the smell test?

You don't have to. You don't have to, we don't have to do any of this. I know. But we might as well do it if we've agreed to do it. I don't think I want to do it. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I thought you would hate that. Is it funny to you sometimes though how different we are or is it just always frustrating?

It's not frustrating. It's like- Disappointing. I feel like I disappoint you a lot. It's so weird. Cause I think if you were like, this thing is giving me so much anxiety. It's causing me stress that I can't handle.

I don't want to do it. Well, I looked over and I was like, oh my God, there's four booklets. I thought that way you were talking. Then I would say, don't do it. If that's going to stress you out, if that's going to cause you pain, then absolutely don't do it.

It's when you, it's like, I don't wanna do that, I'm not doing it. That is a hard mentality for me, for anyone in my life. Yeah, for you, yeah, I totally agree. So I guess, I don't wanna say I'm disappointed, but that might be the right actually word for it. Yeah, I mean, I can feel it, yeah. I mean, I'm sorry.

Well, I just want to explore it. I'm not trying to. Okay, I mean, I don't. It seems like an interesting topic. Yeah, I guess it's because I feel like, well, we all decided to do this. I think you're a rule follower, as we already know, and I'm a rule breaker, as we already know, and I'm a rule breaker, as we already know,

and seeing someone break the rules also gives you anxiety. It gives you personal anxiety to see someone, like, as my position is like, yeah, you don't break the rules, don't break them. And then I don't care that you're not breaking them, but it causes you anguish when I break them in front of you. And I guess I can understand, it's just like, the thought of breaking the rules

is just an uncomfortable feeling for you, even if you're just witnessing it happen with someone else. I think that's a nice way of looking at it. And maybe that is what's happening. I think it's more, I think it's more, why are we doing any of this then? Like, if we're only gonna half do. Why would I argue I'm gonna 96%?

Like so much of the stuff is not that. Sure, if you're gonna pick and choose, maybe it's indicative of a broader fear I have with you. Because I mean, if Rob says I don't wanna do the smell test, I'm not gonna have this feeling, it's toward you. Uh-huh. Because, I mean, I'll be, if Rob says I don't want to do the smell test, I'm not going to have this feeling. It's toward you. Right.

And I think it's because I feel fearful. That like drinking and using drugs is one of the rules? No, no. Oh. But that's an interesting thought. No. I feel fearful, I guess, that you could abandon anything you've committed to.

What if tomorrow you decide you don't want to do this anymore? It's that, I think, really. I mean, I don't think that. Like, consciously, I don't think that. I don't think you're gonna do that. I think you have your commitments and you stick to them. But I think that's what's happening. I think I'm just being honest.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm as interested as you are in. And why? Yeah. That's only for me to fix or change my mentality on. That's not for you to do anything about, but I do think that's probably a factor. Right, gotcha.

Oh, one thing before we end Jonathan, he has some detractors. Yeah, he has several very respected detractors. Yeah. The honor professor at UC Irvine. Yeah, and then that was in Nature magazine. Yeah, she wrote a whole article in Nature. What's her name?

Candice Odgers. Candice Odgers, yes. And she has lots to push back on. But the thing I remember the most is her basically saying, the conclusion that more social media leads to heightened anxiety and depression when it's equally or more compelling to her that people with high anxiety and depression spend more time on social media.

You really can't determine what direction that correlation is heading in. That's a very strong pushback, I think. Feel free to look into some of that other stuff. It's a good article, I read it. And Nature is trusted. Very trusted brand. Extremely trusted brand. All right, that's it for Jonathan Hides.

Glad we got to have him on. Me too. Promote his big fancy book. Yes, and I'm so scared of him too. You didn't seem it. I love being scared like that. It's just weird, it's a weird, this is such a brag, but it's true, it's like, there's not a ton of people I'm very afraid to get in a debate with.

Yeah, I understand. And I'm like terrified to get in a debate with him. That makes sense to me. Jordan Peterson. It's like I've had a lot of people go like, why don't you have Jordan Peterson on? I'm like, because I don't agree with him, nor could I defeat him in a debate.

I know my limits. He is a oral master. And I'd get eviscerated and then I'd leave and go like, oh my God, I don't agree with anything he said, but I couldn't win that argument. Yeah, that's so interesting that you bring that up. I think that's common now where people just have become masters at debate.

Yeah, it's a skill. It's a huge skill. Yeah, it doesn't mean they're right. It doesn't mean they're right. And it doesn't even mean they've thought things out well. They're just very good at communicating and pivoting and it's doing that skill well. I think people who do not host shows

experiences their whole life, which is you're in a relationship with somebody and one of the two of you will be a better debater. It's very rare that both of you are gonna be completely equally matched in a debate. And I think a lot of people end up feeling so disheartened by the fact that the person will never take what they're saying in because they have won the debate.

It's all about winning the debate as opposed to actually understanding one another. Yeah, and I'm certain I've been guilty of this in the past. Me too. But I do think some people, especially in the academic world, really can suffer from this. I was very grateful.

I had a girlfriend who was better at debating than me. And she just blasted me several times, where it's like we left and she had won. And it was so helpful to correct my own behavior, because I was like, oh, all those debates I won, I haven't convinced the person of anything. They just lost the debate or they gave up on the debate as I did.

I had the same hurt feelings that she never addressed. Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm really glad I experienced that because I think I've done that to people. I've done that to people, not I think. I have done that to people, thought I had convinced them to the wisdom I was offering, and I hadn't done anything to help them. I'd made it worse.

And it's interesting when we get in these topics that are very emotional, not we, sometimes we, also we, but in general, when it's an emotional topic, but one of the people is often very good at debating But in general, when it's an emotional topic, but one of the people is often very good at debating or an academic or something. Great memory, that's how I would win a lot of those things. No, that was Tuesday. Now I make a meal out of their saying, right?

Exactly, but they're only using logic and it's really hard in a debate to combat logic. Like you can't. But then everyone leaves, and like the person with the emotional argument is still correct. Like their feelings are still there. They still feel terrible.

They're still probably, you know, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've really had to go, do I want to acknowledge and help to make the person not feel the way they do, or do I want to prove that they don't have a right to feel that way? Yeah. Because that's easy, that's the most appealing to me. Of course.

Like if I can prove to them that they're actually off base and this shouldn't be how they feel, I will erase the feeling by showing that, oh, there's no logical road to how you feel. And once you realize that, you will no longer feel that way. No, they will feel even more like that, because probably their initial issue with me was related to that.

And we've talked about this, but it is worth repeating. Emotions are as important as logic. Let's look at- They're more. They're more important. You go to war over emotion. Exactly. Look at our political landscape. It's emotion driven.

Oh yeah. To act like that isn't a relevant part or to dismiss it in a debate or like just stomp on it with logic is so unhelpful because you're removing an entire real legitimate piece. Yeah. And that's why I get frustrated when people are like, look at the science. I'm like, I know guys, but that's not compelling.

If you're dealing with a fear, science doesn't eradicate fears. That's very true, yeah. Wish everyone was a logical robot. No one had emotions. And I didn't have to talk about them. That would be so boring. It would.

All right. All right, have to talk about them. That would be so boring. It would. All right. All right, love you. Love you. Love you. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.