Modern Wisdom - #766 - Jonathan Haidt - The Hidden Dangers Of Social Media On Mental Health

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Jonathan Haidt is a Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, social psychologist, and an author. The kids are not alright. Mental health is plummeting while anxiety and depression is on the rise. Just what are the contributing elements? Is it social media? Helicopter parenting? 24 hour news? Or something else? Expect to learn why every generation complains about the next one, what is so important about the development of kids between 8 and 12 years old, what the biggest problem is with test scores in primary school children, the real harm of technology on kids, why words like ‘trigger’ and ‘fragility’ are such a problem, if there is a way to do identity politics well and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to 32% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Jonathan Haidt. He's a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, a social psychologist and an author. The kids are not all right. Mental health is plummeting while anxiety and depression are on the rise. Just what are the contributing elements? Is it social media, helicopter parenting, 24-hour news, or something else? Expect to learn why every generation complains about the next one, what is so important about the development of kids between 8 and 12 years old, what the biggest problem is with test scores in primary school children, the real harm of technology on kids, why words like trigger and fragility are such a problem, if there is a way to do identity politics

well, and much more. So the big announcement that I have been playing around with for quite a while since a couple of weeks ago when we filmed the world's first ever five camera podcast on the biggest video wall in Texas. This is basically the same technology that they filmed the Mandalorian on, which is a photo realistic background

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and improving your resilience, your robustness, how to integrate emotions and love and stuff. But more than that, it is technically unbelievably hard to do this and we pulled it off. So yeah, get ready for Monday and check out the YouTube channel to see some previews of what we're going to do. I'm super excited. Thank you to everyone who's already commented on how the clip looks and made them feel and stuff. I really think this is cool. There's not much stuff you can do that no one else has done before, and this is one of them.

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it. Head to www.drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box. That's www.drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jonathan Haidt. We've been orbiting each other for quite a while. It's really nice to finally sit down with you and have a chat. That's right. We ran into each other at the Heterodox Academy conference, which right away tells you that we share some common concerns about the state of society, knowledge at universities, young people, et cetera.

So yeah, here we are. I'm really happy. Doesn't every generation complain about the next one that's coming along is what we're seeing at the moment. Not just more old hats that's occurred for every generation previously. Um, well, yes and no. Yes. Every generation complains and the complaints tend to be similar. And that's gone on not since the dawn of history. People always quote, you know, Socrates or something, but really that begins when you start getting modernity.

You start getting each generation is changing, you know, around the 16th, 17th century in Europe. So yes, that's been going on a long time, but it's never before been the case that the mental health of the young generation suddenly was really different and really bad So, you know the main argument I get against me is just the one you just said that oh, this is just another moral panic There's nothing going on here. This is what always happens. No, this is not what always happens

You don't ever before get a doubling of the suicide rate of preteen girls You don't ever get an across across the board, across many nations, plummeting of mental health, all beginning right around 2012, 2013. So no, this time is really different. What is it that children needs to do in childhood? Like we don't think about it that importantly, it's just, it's just the thing that you do before you get to puberty, where you start to become a person. But those experiences are very formative.

What does a good childhood look like? Yeah, now thanks for setting it up that way because there's so much focus on the phones and social media. And I was focused on that too. But what I decided to do in writing this book and writing The Anxious Generation was, I not even going to talk about the phones and social media until I've taken readers through what is childhood, why do we have it, how is human childhood

different from every other animal including chimpanzees. And so you know if you start just with mammals, all mammals have the same life plan which is huge investment from the parents or the mother in the baby, long childhood, big brain. How do you wire up the brain? Play. Play is the thing. Your brain doesn't grow from nursing. Your brain grows from moving away from your mother, trying to climb something. Anyone who's had a puppy or a kitten knows they want to play all the time because they have to practice the skills to wire up the brain. So we have to let our kids wire up their brains. Now humans are different because we have much bigger brains and we have culture. This is

crucial. Other animals, they grow as fast as they can and then they reproduce. Humans, we grow fast and then we slow down. At age seven to 12, 13, we're not growing very fast. And it's thought that that period is a critical period for cultural learning. All the way through puberty, we're really trying to soak in how do we do things around here? What do adults do? How do I approach the opposite sex or sexuality?

So there's a lot of learning that has to happen. And the problem is we've taken that learning period. We've said, instead of learning from grownups around you, or even from older kids in your neighborhood, how about if we just hook you up, here's a phone or an iPad, we'll just hook you up and you can get socialized by random weirdos on the internet

who are selected by an algorithm for being really extreme. How about that? Well, that's kind of what we've done. Yeah, I, uh, I'm around kids more and more as my friends, um, finally become less man children and actually become fathers themselves of actual children. And it's so interesting. Like my, my group of friends largely are pretty red-pilled on this, the concerns about exposure to technology.

But you know, when you go for dinner at the sort of times that you do with guys that have got families, you end up going a little bit earlier, which means you're also around other families. And we go to these restaurants and I'll get to see, you know, how other families that probably just aren't aware of this are anesthetizing a boisterous child. And a lot of the time at the table, you know, it's the kid starts to act up. They're a little bit bored and the parents are trying to have a conversation or the adults at the table are trying to have a conversation.

And one of them just goes, ah, you know, open up the phone, pass the phone. And the, the maddest thing that I've seen from sort of two to three year old children is their ability to skip ads on YouTube. The maddest thing that I've seen from sort of two to three year old children is their ability to skip ads on YouTube. Like they understand the difference between an advert and the button and how they can get past it. And I'm like, well, first off, look, if you're giving your kid this to anesthetize them, buy YouTube premium.

It's 10 bucks a month and it'll change your life. Gets rid of the ads. Yeah. you premium. It's 10 bucks a month and it'll change your life. Gets rid of the ads. Yeah. But also the, this level of engagement with, you know, the capitalist system of Facebook pixel tagging and all that stuff from two years old is crazy. No, that's right.

That's right. You know, we're very protective of our kids. And if I said to people, how about how about if we have this thing that we have a special door, a special window, and we're going to put it on your child's crib, and advertisers and corporations can come and they can just communicate with your kid and you have nothing to do with it. What do you what do you think? Is that okay? Like, no, we would never let that happen. And then suppose when your daughter is 11, 12, 13, we'll put a special window on her bedroom and strange men can come and they can talk to her through the window and they can look at her through the window. How about that? Would you do that?

Like, no, of course you wouldn't do that. But that's kind of what we're doing. You know, we're saying here, companies kind of access to our kids. They can train them with a stimulus response paradigm. And strangers can have access to our children once they get a social media account. And they can try to convince them to meet up in the real world. They can try to sell them things, all kinds of stuff like that.

Actually, I want to pick up, you use the word anesthetize, which is a very good word here. Because as many people know, like 100, 150 years ago, there were a variety of medications for children that had opiates in them to calm the child and help them sleep, or we'd give them alcohol. We didn't know that these things interfered with their development.

And we all discovered as soon as we got our first iPhone, I mean, I have video, like my son was born in 2006, and so many of our videos of me videotaping him and with him reaching for the phone and saying, iPhone, iPhone, like he, he, you know, he wants it, he needs it. Cause it's so stimulating. Back then in the early days of all this stuff, you know, 2008 to 2012, we thought the technology was magical. And we thought, you know, yeah,

let's let our kids get stimulated by like stimulation. Isn't that going to be good for their brain development? Like, so yeah, it seemed okay to do it. It'll give them a head start. He'll be, you know, digital natives, he'll be comfortable with this technology. And besides everyone else is doing it. So it must be okay. So yeah, we ended up inesthetizing them. Let's back out of the technology thing. We're going to get onto that, but let's just talk about what has changed with regards to parenting styles outside of technology over the last few decades. How has this created the raw material foundation for the kids that would grow up?

No, that's a great question. It's one that I don't write enough about because I am focused on the technology. But Greg and I did write about this in the Coddling of the American Mind that there is a long-term transition over generations as when life is hard and families are big and religion is an important part of life, you tend to have a very structured, you know, kids are growing up with a lot of structure.

There are do's and don'ts. There are punishments if you misbehave. And there's a big liberal-conservative split on this. In general, conservatives want more strict child rearing. Progressives want more lenient, liberal, and now called gentle parenting. And in general, as our societies have gotten wealthier and safer, and our families get smaller, we've all kind of moved over to the gentle side. When I was a kid, spanking was normal, but it was like only for the very, like my sisters and I, we got spanked like a few times when we did something really terrible.

But now it's, you know, at least in educated circles, like that's almost unheard of. Whereas a couple of generations before there would have been a lot more physical punishment. Your school teacher would have. Yes, that's right. Schools would hit the kids. That's right. So, you know, so in many ways it's progress. On the other hand, if you take hand, if you take out the threats,

the punishments, all the negative stuff, and you kind of leave it with like what you see a lot of parents doing like, now Johnny, was that a wise choice or an unwise choice? As opposed to saying, no, you do not hit your sister. So I think we've become a little too gentle, too unstructured. And this might also help explain a really interesting twist

in the data that it's not really in the book. I found a lot of it even afterwards, is that the mental health crisis is much worse for children and families on the left than on the right. So liberals or progressives have always had slightly higher levels of neuroticism, anxiety, depression, just a little bit more than conservatives. It's a big, long studied thing. Conservatives are a little bit happier than liberals, adults and children. And if you plot out the levels of happiness or the negative stuff like meaninglessness, on all the graphs in my book, you'll see like you get a straight line until around 2011, 2012, and then all of a a sudden the lines go up like a hockey stick.

Well, if you break it out by, are you a liberal or conservative? Which is asked on one or two surveys. It's the liberal kids, especially liberal girls, they go up first and fastest. Something happens, whatever it was that changed in the early 2010s, it hit liberal kids, especially liberal girls, the hardest.

And I think part of it is what we're talking about. If you are rooted deeply in structure and community and you have to go to church every Sunday, or you're an Orthodox Jewish kid, you've got Shabbat, you've got 24 hours where there are no devices and you're with your family, moving to the digital technology didn't wash these kids out to see. But if you're a more progressive family, usually a smaller family, uh, more, economic, more mobile, you move around more, perhaps, um, you have weaker ties, a lot of freedom, a lot of creativity, but those kids seem to be especially vulnerable to being washed away in the

early 2010s. It's not just left, right. It's also religious conservative, religious or secular. So, so secular religious, I'm sorry, secular conservative kids show the least increase. Everybody goes up, but they show the least increase. Whereas progressive non-religious kids or families, that's where you see the biggest increase in mental health problems. I wonder how much of it from the liberal progressive side comes from this very softly, softly gentle approach to discipline and parenting because, you know, I, I hesitate dropping into bro psychology this early in a podcast, but fuck it. Like if you think about your level of discomfort exposure, what you're, what

you're comfortable being uncomfortable with, how often has someone told you no? How often have you been told that you're in the wrong? How often has someone raised their voice at you? How often has someone been stern? You know, all of these opportunities are times where you learn, okay, I can self-regulate. This can happen to me and I'm still safe.

This can happen to me and I'm still loved. No one's going to abandon me. This isn't a comment on my moral character or my worth as a human. This is an inbuilt part of being a fallible flawed human that makes errors. And mom and dad are going to say, you don't hit your sister. You don't do that. You're on time out. Go sit on the step and sit on the step until you've calmed yourself down. And if you've never experienced that and you continue it, like, you don't do that. Go, you're on time out, go sit on the step and sit on the step until you've calmed yourself down. And if you've never experienced that and you continue, like you don't even need,

you don't need to know anything about human psychology to know that if you train a system on a type of stimulus, it will become hypersensitized when you get outside the bounds of that stimulus. Yeah. And that's where we are. That's right. No, I think that's perfect. I can just add a little psychological color to it

in two ways. One is to bring in the concept of anti-fragility, which I hope many of your listeners are already familiar with. You know, some things are fragile, a glass is fragile, you don't let kids play with it, it'll break. So we give them plastic, which is resilient. If a kid drops it, it won't break, but it doesn't get better. But some things are anti-fragile. They need to be stressed and strained and dropped and suffer setbacks in order to get better. But some things are anti-fragile. They need to be stressed and strained and dropped and, and, and suffer setbacks in order to get strong. And this comes from this my NYU colleague Naseem Taleb. So bones and muscle are anti-fragile. If you raised your kids by saying, I never want you

to put stress on your bones, you know, never go downstairs, take the elevator, you know, their bones are going to get weak. Same thing with muscle. The immune system is antifragile and kids are antifragile. So that's, that's like the psychology underneath a lot of what you were just saying. But then there's another one, which I haven't really talked about publicly because it sort of can easily get taken out of context. Maybe that'll happen here when I never we have the most unreasonably reasonable audience on the internet, you'll be fine. Okay. It's really important for kids to learn how to accept injustice.

Now, let me quickly keep talking so that that doesn't just get taken out of context. You know, John Hyatt, white guy says that people need to just suck it up and accept injustice. No, but the situation that you just talked about, you know, like, no, you do not hit your sister, time out. And it might be the case that your sister hit you first. And maybe there's more to the story. And so maybe your parents are actually treating you unfairly. And in general, we would say, you know, authoritative parents would always hear them out, like, why did you hit your sister? Tell me why,

you know, if you can't justify it, we'll punish you. But sometimes, sometimes things are unfair. And if you're a child who is raised where in general, your parents, you know, you trust them in general, they're fair, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're just not. And you just learn like, okay, you know, it happens, I'm a little mad and I'll get over it. Okay, now fast forward 15, 20 years. Imagine you're an employer hiring two recent college grads. One of them has never had to face injustice. One of them, everything was always fair, and if they thought it wasn't fair, they could say, I think that's unfair, and then they could work it out.

Another kid had authoritative parents who sometimes made mistakes and sometimes was treated unfairly. Who would you rather hire? And I think what we're seeing in universities is that there's a certain kind of activist young person who sees flaws in the world and thinks that they see everything as it is, and they should never have to accept any unfairness. And they can just become very, very difficult to work with, because they're used to getting in their way.

So yeah, we're doing kids no favors with this sort of, you know, gentle, you shouldn't have to do anything that doesn't make you comfortable. Like, no, sometimes in life you do have to do things that make you uncomfortable or that, you know, or that you think you have to respond to situations that you think are unfair. Has your light just gone off?

Have you lost light on your face? No, it hasn't. Nothing's changed about my setting. That might just be my eyeballs. It doesn't matter. No, it's all good. Okay. I spent a lot of time running a big events company in the UK. So I ran nightclubs for a decade and a half.

And one of the things that I very quickly realized, stepping into that industry is it's full of scumbags. I was trained in the art of scumbaggery, but, you know, if I'd gone into that industry is it's full of scumbags. I was trained in the art of scumbaggery, but, uh, you know, if I'd gone into that, I had this really interesting experience because I was a university, right? So I was seeing, and I was doing two business degrees to the masters and a bachelor's in business stuff, but I was running a business and from doing nightlife, you get to see HR, marketing, B2B, B2C, hiring, firing, everything. You see the full works, right?

It's a full gamut of everything. So I was getting to learn about business 101, but I was also experiencing business and what I was being taught and what I was experiencing were diverging very quickly. But the interesting point here is up until you leave university, most people can campaign their way out of situations that they don't want to be in. This is wrong. The standards that this professor is holding me to are too high. You know, we've seen this happen a good bunch, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Right. When you enter the world of business, someone doesn't need to play by your rules. They can, they can bring you up to the brink of signing a contract. Your balls deep in lawyer fees. Everything's ready to go. You bet the business on it. And they can go, uh, by the way, this is it's called crank on confirmation is, is the actual tactic.

And they just crank the fuck out of you and they go, Hey, um, yeah, we're going to pay 20% and I saw this deal is dead in the water. And you go, no, you can't do it because I've got, I'm, I'm, I'm, and they, yeah, we know that you're this deep in it, which is why we want to pay 20% less. Like that's just business works. Like this is what crank on confirmation is. And it happens in nightlife over and over and over and over again. My point being, if you, like, if you're unable to deal with someone coming and twisting you,

or you're going, all right, well, I know that you need me. Let's, let's play a game of chicken here with who needs who the most. You're just going to be so dysregulated that you can't deal with anything. My point being this sort of hyper, I think of it like an Overton window of sensitivity. You know, you have the entire gamut of human experience experience and then you have this range within which you're familiar. The tighter that you make that any small movement outside of that is going to feel like, like dysregulation. And I suppose as well, this gets into something I've spoken about with Dr. Annamachian and

tons of people to do with child rearing, the importance of risky play and why it's so important. Yes, that is such a key word. And this is something I think that won't be as familiar to listeners. Even listeners who might've read The Coddling of the American Mind or might know about the importance of play. There's really interesting research,

there's a play researcher from Norway named Ellen Sand-Sator. And she has a couple of papers from 2010 and more recently on the need for risk, specifically risk and thrill. And the key word that I really resonate with is thrill. So we know that even if you know kids need to play, but we don't want them to play in any place dangerous.

We don't want them to climb any trees. As far as I can tell, New Zealand is the only English speaking country left in the world where children are allowed to climb trees. You know, like I remember, you know, at recess when I was a kid, if there's a tree, you know, sometimes we climb a tree. But we've we sort of decided we have to keep kids safe from danger. So nothing that could have any real danger. But what sense either points out is why are kids seeking out danger? Why is this almost a universal feature?

Why are kids doing things that they're almost certainly gonna make them get hurt? Why are boys doing jumps on their bicycle? They know they're gonna get hurt. Why are kids skateboarding down steep hills? They know they're gonna fall at some point. And the reason she says is because part of our evolutionary programming

is to test our abilities, learn to manage risks that are small risks, because life is full of risks. Once you're not protected by your parents, boy is life dangerous out in the jungle, out in the wild, out in the world of nightclubs. So part of our mandate as a child is try things that are a little bit dangerous, And you get to select how dangerous it is. And so, when I would take my kids to Coney Island here in New York City, a big amusement park area, the kids in the car, there'd be so much discussion of like, are you gonna do the Thunderbolt today or the slingshot? Like, oh no, that's too scary for me.

Everyone, they're all trying to adjust, but then once they do it, they come off. I mean, they are jumping, they are exhilarated. The thrill is what they've been craving. And what Sand Cedar says is it's that process of being afraid, being really afraid, like the roller coaster, it's about to go over the top and it's about like, you're really afraid. And then on the way down, you're screaming and it's thrilling and pleasurable and fearful. And then when you get to the bottom and you make it off the other end, it's just thrilling.

And when you do that, you're actually changing your brain. You do that over and over again, and you develop the brain of a person who can face down some scumbag or some person threatening them, who can actually deal with threats and stand their ground and think quickly and not just panic and meltdown. So our kids need risk and thrill. That means they're gonna get hurt, they're gonna sometimes break bones, but

the alternative is to keep them soft so that they're gonna break their minds. What this obviously rolls from, um, Infancy parents into preschool school, secondary school. What's happening to children when they get into school and they are first faced with test scores and assessment and, and structure, you have to get to school at this time and no, you can't do that. And the teacher, like how much of this is laid at the feet of parents and how much of this is laid at the feet of the education system? Yeah, it's a kind of a, yeah, it is a mix. Um, the sort of the normal human progression is up until age six, seven, maybe even eight, there's really no value at all to

homework or having too much structure. You know, by eight, nine, ten, you know, they can really learn, you know, to fit in, to conform. But the early grade, especially kindergarten and first grade here in the U.S., there's really very little evidence that they benefit from being pushed to read faster or to learn math faster. We have this naive idea that if they start learning multiplication in kindergarten, they will end up in high school further ahead. It's kind of a naive notion of we'll give them a head start and they'll end up further ahead, but that's not true.

In Scandinavia, especially Finland, where they don't really start kids until age seven, they don't really do any academic stuff until age seven, and their kids are among the best in the world in all these academic measures. So I guess I would say at a certain point, yeah, they do need to learn all that stuff. They do need to be self-regulating, and if they're going to fit into a free market capitalist economy and be functioning people and be prosperous, they need self-confinement, all those skills. But that doesn't mean you have to really start them very strictly early on. What kids need in kindergarten and first grade is especially a lot more play than we give them.

We need to really back off on the homework and the heavy academics in kindergarten and first grade, is my opinion. What's happening to test scores with regards to students? So there are two, there's a global measure of test scores around the world. That's PISA, the Program for International something assessment, scholastic I suppose.

And with PISA, what we see is that scores were going up from the 90s, I think it started in the 90s. Scores were sort of going slowly up from the 90s to the 2012 assessments every three years. And beginning at the 2012 assessment, some of them start to go down. And then they go down further in the most recent. And everybody points to that says, Oh, COVID, wow, COVID was so terrible. And it was, it was terrible that we took kids out of school. It was terrible that we took kids who weren't in any danger and said, you don't get to go to school

because what if you bring home the virus to an adult? And so it's true that COVID, you know, being out of school did hurt test scores, but what people are only just beginning to realize, when you look at those graphs, it didn't start with COVID. It started when kids and everybody got on phones around 2012. In America, we have the NEEP, N-A-E-P, National Assessment of Educational Progress.

It's called the nation's report card. Same thing. There we have data back from the 70s. So we were making progress, like kids literally, in fourth or eighth grade, whenever they measure it, kids literally were learning more about math, science, and reading. There was progress for decades, slow but steady progress, until 2012.

And then it begins to reverse. And yes, it reverses even more during COVID, but the reversal started around 2012. So I think the main thing we should be focusing on here is phones in schools. We'll talk more about what phones are doing to all of us. But the idea that a child has access, like a seventh grader has a smartphone in their pocket, they're going to text. If the phone is available, someone is texting. And if someone is texting or group texting or posting on Instagram, then everyone has to be checking. Otherwise at lunch, they're going to be the one who doesn't know the thing that

happened during third period. So once kids around 2012 is when we get the phone based childhood, that's roughly when teens switch from flip phones to smartphones right around them. As soon as that happens, they're not paying as much attention at school. They're not learning enough. They're not learning as much as they did. They're not paying as much attention at school. They're not learning enough. They're not learning as much as they did. They're not paying as much attention to each other and they start getting lonelier. So after 2012, our kids are getting stupider and lonelier.

And I think a lot of it, not all, but a lot of it is because of the phone. What was that article that you tweeted about Gen Z reading books for pleasure or them not doing it? Yes. So Jean Twenge,enge, who's been fantastic, she was one of the first to really call attention to this in 2017, that something big is happening to our kids. And Jean is a master of these four giant data sets

that we have in America, long running surveys, monitoring the future goes back to the 1970s. Every year they interview large samples of 12th graders, 10th graders, and 8th graders. And so we have decades of data and one of the questions they ask a lot of questions. One of them is, you know, how often do you read books for pleasure or have you read a book for pleasure in the last month? I can't remember the exact timing. And what Gene shows is that the number

who have read no books, I think that's how it is, like, you know, how many have you read? You know, zero in the last year for pleasure, or, you know, one to three, or five to 10. The number who have read zero books in the last year has been going up for a while. It didn't start in 2012. As kids are watching more television, cable TV, going on the internet, book reading has

been declining, being replaced by other screens. That's been going on for a long time. But it accelerates after 2012 because again, once you have a smartphone and you have social media, which is going to suck up all of your time, there is no limit to how much you need to consume or post or monitor. So life on a smartphone, what I'm calling the phone-based childhood, takes up so much time. There is no time for hobbies or reading or anything. And so Gene shows these dramatic graphs of the number who never read a book, those go up and the number of books people read on average goes down.

We have a nation of young people who have read very, very few books. Is there anything else that we need to say about the education system and what it's got wrong maybe from a disciplinarian standpoint? We know about this sort of early thrusting of academic achievement onto kids in the hopes that it kind of starting earlier pushes them out ahead more late. Is there anything else aside from the technology that the education system has got wrong? Oh my goodness. Yes. So one of the, you know, in this book, I'm trying to be totally not political and just really just focus on the kids. But since I'm talking with you, Chris,

I'll share some other thoughts. Roll bigots here, it's fine, Jonathan. So education schools have been accused of being ideologically progressive since the 1930s. And they are, they lean left. The military leans right, the police lean right, the arts lean left, education schools lean left. That's just the way it is. That's not necessarily a problem. But what I've been focused on since 2011

as a social scientist is the loss of viewpoint diversity. When everyone trying to figure something out, if everyone's on the left or the right, you don't get your confirmation biases challenged. And you start getting what I've called, you start getting structural stupidity. That is, you know, someone can say something really stupid and no one dares to challenge them because if you challenge them, you look like you're a conservative

or you know, or a sexist or a racist or something. You'll be accused of something. So people just keep their mouth shut. I get emails from students in grad programs and education periodically and they say basically, help, I came here to learn how to teach. All we learn how to do is racial justice and equity. Like we never learn, you know, everything is oppression, everything's racism. We don't learn how to teach. So I can't say this is true for all ed schools, but for the elite schools, I think they are largely, they've become very, very

ideological. They were that before 2015. But in the kind of the great awokening that we've had in the real intensification of sort of the left right culture war, you know, we can see the right going off the deep end in a lot of ways. But you know, if we're talking about schools, it's really it's, you know, the left and the education schools. So I think that there's always been a debate between sort of progressive educational ideals and conservative and I've always seen that as a yin-yang sort of thing,

like you actually need the tension of them pushing. But since there are very few conservatives left in higher education, you know, in the social sciences and in education schools, it's all now very, very ideologically progressive. And that means you have a lot more the gentle parenting, the focus on equality of outcomes by race, regardless of inputs. Let's get rid of tests. Let's get rid of honors classes. So I think education schools have been working very,

very hard to lose the trust of centrists, Republicans, and anyone who actually cares that their kids get an education. So again, in the current book on mental health, I don't want to get into it. But if we're talking about what's happening to our kids' schools and education, I think the educational establishment

is becoming structurally stupid. And we saw clear evidence of this in San Francisco during COVID, where the school board was, they were totally focused on pulling down statues of Abe Lincoln and renaming schools. And the citizens of San Francisco, who are very far left, were so fed up with it, they voted out the school board. So yeah, I think the education system is becoming, in this country, very, very ideological. Talk to me about the newest data that you found around smartphones. You know, you've been circling this wagon for quite a while.

And it's been a good bit of time on this book since your last one, which was something not too dissimilar. What are the primary harms of technology on kids and what's the latest data of other? Sure. So there's been, you know, a lot, there's a huge academic literature on whether we all agree that there's a correlation. We all agree. It turns out even there's a few major sort of skeptics and critics, and then there's Jean Twenge and me on the other side. And that's sort of the, where a lot of the debate has been. And it turns out we actually agree on the size of the correlation

between how much time you spend on social media and how anxious and depressed you are. When you say we agreed, you mean you and Jean or you and the other side? No, no, me and the other side. They've done a number of meta-analyses and they say, you know, the correlation is around 0.1 to 0.15, but that's for boys and girls together. Whereas Jean and I and many others have found the correlation is much bigger for girls.

Social media harms girls much more than boys. So Jean and I found that the correlation for girls is about 0.2. Well, that's actually pretty much the same. If they say it's 0.1 to 0.15 correlation for everyone, that means they're basically saying the correlation is around 0.15, maybe even higher for girls. So we actually agree. And that correlation is actually pretty big in public health effect.

It's not big in a mathematical sense of variance explained, but it's about the same size as you get from many other public health things, you know, calcium consumption and later osteoporosis. I mean all sorts of effects are around that size. So we actually agree on that. But then the debate, they say it's small, we say it's actually as big as everything else. The big debate is okay, there's a correlation, but correlation doesn't show causation. You know, we have to prove causation and so I've been Collecting I started this in 2019 after I was challenged on the coddling the American mind I said well, let's get to the bottom of this

Is there a mental health crisis because back then the critics were saying there isn't even a mental health crisis It's just you know self-report stuff. It's it's not it's an illusion, now it's clear. No, it was not an illusion. The rates have been going up since 2012. Now the question is what caused it. And I've been collecting experiments with these big Google Docs. If you go to JonathanHite.com slash reviews, you can find all of our Google Docs created with Zach Rausch. And we have one that lists all the studies we can find that are correlational studies, the longitudinal studies, the experimental studies. Sorry, and this is getting too geeky and all. But the point is, we have about 20, 25 true experiments

that we found. And the large majority of them do show causal effects. And the ones that don't show causal effects is very interesting. If you look at the six or seven that fail to find an effect of taking kids off phones, they all use a very short time period. So if your experiment is we're gonna make kids stay or college students stay off of social media for a week, you know, or three

days, and then we're gonna see how they're doing. And guess what? You take somebody who's heavily addicted, you take away their drug, and you check in on them a day later or a week later. How are they doing? Not well. But the studies that waited a month, almost all find they're doing a lot better, they're much happier. So, you know, I don't know what else we can do here.

Like we've got the correlation of evidence, we've got the experimental evidence. The experimental evidence shows a clear pattern where if you refine it to the ones that match theoretically what's happening, the effect gets bigger. You've got the quasi, I mean, you know, people should go look at this Google doc. I mean, I don't know what else we can do to convince people that it's not just correlational. There's a lot of causal evidence.

What ways could you be wrong about this evidence? Um, so on the experimental evidence, the published experiments, my critics say that if you look at each of these studies, they're mostly pretty weak. Some of them have small sample sizes, just one or 200. Some of them, there's some other flaw. And so you can definitely find flaws in most of the experiments. So it's possible that they're right and that only experiments that find an effect get published.

That is conceivable. But there are so many different lines of evidence here. And so I would ask listeners to think about, we have a situation in which the parents see the problem. The parents whose kids are dead think that it was only because of social media that the kid committed suicide. They can see the harassment taking place online. So you have the parents saying, this is causal.

I don't know any parents who say, oh no, it's wonderful for my kid to be on social media. The teachers see it, the principals see it, the psychologists see it, the kids themselves see it. You had Freya India on. She is one of the best writers on what is happening to girls. And Freya published a great essay on my sub-stack. I think she referred to it on your show on the algorithmic conveyor belt of just, once you express an interest in something, the algorithm's gonna pull you all the way to eating disorders or self-harm or whatever it is.

So given that I can't find, I literally cannot find anything written by someone in Gen Z that says, no, we love our phones, our phones are great, our phones make our world better. You know, social media is so good for it. I can't even find anyone saying that. But we have lots of people like Freya who are saying this is destroying us.

So when you look at the experimental evidence that uses very limited manipulations, one very particular operationalization of the question finds a certain effect size. You've got to ask yourself, which is more plausible that everyone is wrong and all the experiments are wrong, or maybe it's the case that something is really happening here. What is the proposed mechanism by people that say smartphones

don't have this big of an impact on mental health, because the mechanism is what's being debated. The change in mental health is pretty undeniable. We have very, very high rates of whatever it is. Like the most cataclysmic language about girls between age 12 and 16. It's like persistent feelings of hopelessness or listlessness or something. Like just this like awful apocalyptic language. What are the people who disagree with you saying is the mechanism that's causing this

to happen? Right, they don't. They don't. That's the amazing thing. So you have, you know, you look at the graphs and they go up in very much the same way, same time in the U.S., the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia. We've got graphs of all this. I hope your listeners will go to afterbabble.com. That's my substack. It's free We've got all the graphs from all these countries. We've got the world's repository of data internationally It all starts in the early 2010s And so my critics say well the amount of variance explained is very small. So You know the so you

Using social media can only explain a small amount of variance. Therefore, it can't explain the explosion and we're done here. And then I say, well, what do you think does explain it? No one even offers. There's no alternate theory. The global financial crisis is at least global, but that was 2008. So why is it that nothing happens to teen mental health until 2012, 2013, by which time unemployment is dropping, stock market's rising, everything's getting better. So the global financial crisis

doesn't work. There is no other explanation that I can find, not even one that's been proposed, other than the loss of the play-based childhood to be replaced by the phone-based childhood. And that really happened between 2010 and 2015 is when the phone based childhood came in that explains the globalness of it. It explains the suddenness of it. It explains the gender difference. It explains everything that I found. And you know, my critics say, well, we're not convinced, but we have, we're

not even going to offer an alternative explanation. So boring. Super lame. All right. What are the primary harms of technology on kids? So once you see that kids have to grow up in a physical world, we evolved outdoors, nature, animals, people.

When kids grow up on screens, so it's not just about social media. When you grow up with what I'm calling a phone-based childhood, where you're spending the latest data, I think is nine hours a day average for American kids, 11 hours, Freya just said there's a British study it was like 10 or 11 hours a day for British kids on their phones which includes other includes tablets I think and video games I think. In any case it

doesn't include homework or schoolwork just recreational time 9 to 11 hours a day that pushes out everything else. And so what I say in the book is that there are four foundational harms. Once you see that it's taken up 10 hours a day, pushing everything else out, what matters? The most important thing is time with other kids, time with friends.

That's crucial. I mean, all of your, in person, that's right, in person. And we'll talk about whether virtual is good. It is not. But time actually with other kids, other with your friends. And that has plummeted since 2012. It was dropping before in the earlier internet age, but boy, it really speeds up

in the smartphone social media age. And so kids, the most nutritious thing your kid can do is be out playing with other kids, and this is even true for teenagers, hanging out with no adults telling them what to do. So that's crucial. That's really nutritious, as it were. Now, if kids, you might say, well, but you know, the spending of this 10, 11 hours, a lot of it is spent virtually interacting, you know, like on video games. Well, let's look at multiplayer video games. Now, those are at least synchronous.

Synchronous is good. You're talking, so that's actually a good thing. The girls on social media, it's asynchronous. I comment, I wait anxiously for you to comment on my comment. And so we're not really connecting. We're actually performing and we're anxious. Video games are at least synchronous, but you actually, you tell me, I was never a gamer.

It seems to me that- When you assume that I'm a, you look at me and just think've never, I was never a gamer. It seems to me that you look at me and just wasted a lot of hours playing video games. Am I wrong? I wasted a lot of hours playing video games. Sure. Okay, there you go. Stereotypes sometimes have a basis in reality. So basically, you know, you're a healthy male.

That means you almost certainly were playing video games. I mean, that's just the way it's been since the nineties. Um, so, but you tell me in video games, you ever get in fights? Like, like you get mad at each other because someone broke a rule. Oh, how does, how does that happen? Because I assume that the game itself regulates all the interactions. How you mean like fights in game. Right?

No, no, no. I mean, you just have disagreements. You have disagreements. You shout and you say that that was, that was totally stupid. Like it's more. Oh yeah, fine. No, but what I mean is like, think about when you, when you and your friends play, you know, pick up soccer game or baseball game or whatever, when you're kids and someone says,

no, you know, it was out of bounds. No, it wasn't. Yes, it was. No, it wasn't. Like you argue about it. And what I'm trying to say is the arguments are really nutritious. The arguments... Jean Piaget, the great developmental psychologist, really talked a lot about this.

When kids play marbles, they get in all kinds of disputes, and that's crucial. They learn how to work it out. So you tell me, when you're playing video games, and an average day, you know, four hours of video game playing, do you get in those kind of fights about, yes, it was, no, it wasn't, yes, it was, no, it wasn't. Yes, it was. It wasn't. Well, no, the game, the game is, the game mandates the rule set for you. Exactly. There is no mediating needed. That's right. There you go. So it's just like if I said, we're going to replace all your kids' food with rice, white rice. And then someone said, yeah, that, that should be just as good. I mean,

it's got just the same number of calories. You know, you might say, yeah, that, that should be just as good. I mean, it's got just the same number of calories. You know, you might say, yeah, but it's missing all the other nutrients. And that's what we do when we put boys on video games. Yeah, it's social. It's great fun. It has some benefits. It gives them some social calories. They're talking, but it's missing a lot of the nutrients that you get from face to

face interaction, okay. Face to face interaction that gets squeezed. That's one, that's just one. I'll go faster on the rest of them. Number two, sleep deprivation. When kids have a screen in their room, again, these things are designed to be addictive. And when you let your kids spend hours

with a device designed to be addictive, sometimes they get addicted. And so the kids who have a, who have dependency, they're gonna take their phone into bed with them, under the covers. You know, mom can't see that the light is still on because it's under the covers. So social media in particular, and browsing the internet, takes away a lot of sleep. And if you take away sleep from teenagers who are already not getting enough, they're going to be crankier, less healthy, they're going to gain weight. There's all kinds of things that happen physiologically and emotionally, which exacerbate mental illness epidemics. That's two,

the loss of sleep. The third is attention fragmentation. One of the main things kids need to do as teens, your brain is rewiring throughout childhood. Your brain is sort of pretty big by the time you're five or six and then a lot of it's just the rewiring, the myelination of circuits In your teen years the frontal cortex myelinates the the prefrontal cortex especially is the seat of executive control Can you set a goal keep your eye on the goal do the things necessary to reach the goal? even though there are distractions and As adults we've all learned to do that to some degree

But crucially in that learning was those teen years when the frontal cortex is really laying down, you know, like, how do you do this? And instead what we do is it's like we put little distractors, you know, if a lot of the kids are getting interrupted every couple of minutes for their whole life, they never even spend 10 minutes without an interruption. This appears to interfere with their development

of executive function. So we're creating young people who when they come to the office, they can't just pay attention to something. They need more stimulation and then they don't pay full attention. So attention fragmentation is devastating to their ability to be productive and creative. And then the fourth foundational harm is addiction. You know, I get in big arguments with this with some of the researchers who are who study video games who think video games are good and they point out you know most boys are having a great time and there's no sign of trouble problem. Well and that's true, that's true. Most boys

who play video games I can't say that they're damaged by it but five or ten percent are. The ones who develop problematic gaming who are Compulsive have compulsive use when they're not playing they become surly their brain is deficient in dopamine. They are addicted. They have a dependency If you're going through your puberty years as a boy getting this incredible amount of fixed stimulation of you know from you know Fortnite or you know, whatever game you're playing this is in addition to messing up your life you're not you're not spending time with friends you're not learning how to talk to girls whatever it is this is likely to have some very lasting possibly

permanent effect so those are the four foundational harms they affect boys and girls girls on social media not so much video games. And then there's all the specific harms that affect boys and girls, we can get into those. But if all you knew was here's this consumer product, it's gonna take your kid away from his friends, it's gonna deprive him of sleep, it's gonna fragment his ability to focus,

and it's gonna addict him. What do you say? Do you want this for your kid? Like who would ever say yes, but we did. Is it right to call social media use an addiction? I had this discussion with Andrew Huberman a couple of years ago and I sort of, yeah, what did he say? He said it looks to him more like a compulsion than an addiction. It feels like compulsive behavior. Um, he said, you know, if you, if you saw an animal, uh, scratching, scratching,

scratching in the corner, looking for food, scratching, scratching, scratching, scratching, scratching, you'd think that animal's sick. And it, it feels to me, you know, I, you're on a plane. How many times, it's such a great example. You're on a plane. You have no signal. You know, you have no signal. You pull your phone out, you open it up, you go through the little cycle of apps

or whatever it is that you do and you go, ah, yeah, goes back down. So to me, that seems compulsive. Now, obviously addictive things can have a compulsion. That's the reason I haven't got anything long and thin that I can use, but that's the reason that smokers will get pens and chew down on pens. It actually satiates. I think I saw something that saying that people who have smoking addiction can satiate a little bit of the desire for the next cigarette by

actually putting a replacement cigarette in their mouth. Cause so much of it is about the like physiological, the movement of that habituated thing. So, I mean, the semantics of what is an addiction, where does that cross across into a compulsion? Can something which is addictive lead you to have this sort of obsessive compelled behavior, the way you kind of pull this,

it kind of doesn't really matter. But have you got any insight on that? No, I do. I know that among addiction researchers, there's a debate about whether behavioral addictions are true addictions. And if you look at what happens in the brain when a person is addicted to heroin or to cocaine,

that's incredibly well studied. I don't know the details. This is not my area of expertise. But that's incredibly well studied. And then I think some of them are saying, when you look at behavioral addictions, it's a little different, it's not quite the same. Fine, I can totally accept that. But to me, the question is just, let's just take gambling addiction.

Most of us have been to a casino, the great majority don't have any problem, don't have any addiction, but a small number, I don't know what the percentage is, I'm guessing it's probably two to 7% because that's what I keep finding for behavioral addictions. For some number, they, when they get into a zone, it's straight behaviorist psychology, stimulus response, variable ratio, reward schedules, they get into a zone and they lose track of time and they forget their troubles. And of course, their troubles are in part because they're blowing all their family's money on slot machines, but they can't stop.

So I think, would you say that a person who compulsively uses slot machines spends most of her family's money so that the family is now bankrupt and yet she still keeps doing it? Would you call that a compulsion or an addiction? Both. Okay. Even if you call it, that's fine with me. If you want to call it that a compulsion or an addiction? Both. Okay.

Even if you call it, that's fine with me. If you want to call it just a compulsion, that's fine. My point is, whatever that is, gambling addicts, which is real. Even if you would, yeah, call it whatever you want. Whatever you want to call it. That is what is happening to social media, compulsive users. Whatever you want to call it, it's the same thing.

And it's, I mean, in a sense, it's literally the same thing because some of the features of our life on phones were directly copied from casinos, the thing where you pull down to refresh and then it kind of bounces up and you see things like that was literally copied from slot machines. Shout out Tristan Harris. Yeah. He was, uh, that's right. Yes.

Tristan Tristan is a hero in all of this. Tristan really brought our attention. Everyone about this. Yeah, for sure. All right. So, you know, there's been a lot of talk recently. I've got Daniel Cox coming on, the guy that did that really fantastic study

about young boys breaking to the right and young girls breaking to the left. I've got him coming in soon. But we're seeing a lot of sexed differences in worldview and belief in mental health. What mental health is declining, but the ways that it's declining, the sort of usages of

technology. So talk to me about the sex differences in technology, how do boys and girls use technology differently? Sure. Yeah. So the master variable here, I believe, is a set of motivations that we've talked about psychology for 50 years called agency and communion. So everybody has needs for agency to be an agent to make things

happen. You know, a child knocks over a block tower. It's thrilling. I did that. I caused that to fall. So that's agency. And then communion is connection, being part of a group, being welcomed and embraced and connecting. So everyone has both motives. But on average, boys have stronger agency motives. And when you let boys and girls choose what to do, the boys are going to gravitate more towards games that allow agency. And so fake war is one of the best examples. They want to practice their skills. Boys, I think, are evolutionary programmed for hunting and war, to enjoy hunting and

war. I found this out when I was 29 years old and for the first time in my life, played paintball with my buddies and hunting each other, we were mixed in with other people, but hunting each other in small groups and shooting guns to try to hit each other was the most thrilling thing we'd ever done. That'll get you, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so that was really cool. Like, wow, there's like a room in my heart for being a hunter and a warrior. Like I didn't really know it was there, but it was. So anyway, boys choose to pursue agency motives. Girls choose to pursue more communion motives. They talk more with each other as Richard Reeves, this wonderful, wonderful British man who has this, uh, it has been, been making the case for boys. Have you, have you had Richard on the show? Of course. Yeah. He's great. Of course. Yeah. His new initiative that the center for boys and men American the show? Of course. Yeah. He's great. Of course. Back on again soon. Yeah. His new initiative that is the center for boys and men, American Institute for Boys

and Men. Yeah. Thank you. Uh, that sounds awesome. I'm fully Richard Reeves, Pilled. I'm on board with good. Oh, good. Yes.

Me too. We're all Richard Reeves, Pilled. Yes. Um, so Richard points out, uh, uh, girls like to do things face to face. Boys like to do things shoulder to shoulder. Like we're next to each other, but we're doing something. I've got it. I need to bring this up.

So in a Robin Dunbar's book, Friends, which came out maybe 18 months ago, it's got this phenomenal study. So the next time that you're at a party, look at the angle of the feet that women have when they talk to each other and look at the angle of the feet that men have. Like what, what do you mean? What do you see? Women will talk perpendicular uh, perpendicular 180 degrees. They'll be pretty much straight on like this.

Men talk at about 120 degrees. Oh, that's fascinating. So they blade and the reason being that this is a bit of sort of evolutionary bro psychology coming in, but I think it's true. If you even try it, you can try it the next time that you, you're at a party. Just, you know, you'll be stood sort of like this with a guy, just blading on and just turn yourself so that you're actually straight onto them. And there's this just rises up inside of you because really the only time that

two guys would do that is if they were going to fight or they were going to kiss. And if you don't intend on doing those things and you just feel you're like, this feels right. There's something about that angle. It's like two magnet, two North poles of a magnet. Right? Yeah. It's a good example. Divot away.

They don't want to. Yeah. Dude, look at it. 120 degrees for men, 180 degrees for women. It's, and you can't not see it. once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's so good. Now I will look for that. And actually that, this could suggest a really cool difference

between real and virtual, you know, virtual interactions are not embodied. Like we can see, you know, we can see each other's upper bodies here, but, but I think what we would find, cause I don't at all feel freaked out by you, you know, your face onto me on my head. Yeah. But I don't at all feel freaked out by you, you know, your face onto me on my head. Yeah, but I don't at all feel like, oh, we've either got to kiss or fight, like because we're virtual. Well, we wait till we finish.

Well, yeah, you know, you are pretty handsome, I must say. So again, something, you know, we are embodied creatures, we're physical creatures, we're animals, we evolved outdoors, you know, we had fights, we had hunts, we're physical creatures. And when we interact now, virtually, we have only, you know, it's like the white rice thing, we have just like a little few of the nutrients, but we're missing most of them. So anyway, on to boys and girls. Sorry, I'm taking too long on this. But the point is, boy, so when, you know, laptops, and then especially smartphones come out, all the kids love them, all the

kids gravitate, all the kids are on them. The boys head straight for video games and YouTube. The boys are spending more time on video games and YouTube and porn. The girls go straight for the visual social media platforms, especially Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest in the early days. And so what are the effects? The girls are now on these platforms that are all about, I post a picture of me and my life,

and then I wait for strangers to comment on it. And that's really, really bad for mental health. And that I think is why the girls, as soon as we hit 2012, 2013, the girls have very sharp elbows in the graphs, very hockey stick lines in the graphs. Boys on the other hand, they're playing video games especially. Video games aren't making them depressed. Now the boys are getting more depressed and anxious. They are roughly twice as depressed and

anxious as they used to be, but it's more gradual. It starts a little sooner. It starts more like 2009-20, and it ends more gradual. So I think what's happening, and what Zach Rush and I concluded in the book, and here we drew on Richard Weaves, is for girls, boom, they get on social media, they get depressed. For boys, they've been withdrawing from the real world since the 70s and 80s.

It used to be a male world. There used to be a patriarchy. But boy, has it been dismantled. And as everything shifts towards girls and as schools get more and more structured towards girls and girls needs and girls ways of learning. And as we all freak out about gender gaps, and we think that it's the girls we have to help in the nineties, which wasn't true, girls had already passed boys. Boys are finding that they don't do well in school, they don't like school, but man, these video games are just getting better and better. And it's hard to approach a

girl, but man, the pornography is getting better and better. And now you've got AI girlfriends, and soon AI girlfriends will be put into incredibly sexy robots. So what we're seeing is the progressive withdrawal of boys from effort in the real world that will pay off in the long run. And instead boys prodigious energy and their desires are being directed into a virtual world that generates nothing, absolutely nothing of any value in the real world.

Yeah, the audience is gonna know what I'm gonna bring up, but I'm gonna do it again. It's my, I've only had two citations ever in academia and this is one of them. So you'll be aware of young male syndrome. No, tell me what, just that they're more violent and- Yes, correct. High proliferation of young sexless men,

high tea, high risk taking. They set shit on fire and push over granny, it's not good. Totally agree. We have the highest rates of loneliness and sexlessness amongst young men, at least in the modern world, maybe ever apart from him, maybe some like crazy gerontocracy style, like tribal bullshit 10,000 years ago, um, where's all of the incel violence, like this isn't a request, but why are we not seeing more mass shootings?

Why are we not seeing all the rest of it? Oh, that's a good point. Why are we not seeing more mass shootings? Why are we not seeing all the rest of it? Oh, that's a good point. So it's my contention that men are being sedated out of their status seeking and reproductive seeking behavior through a combination of social media, video games, and porn. So they're not given a sufficient dose to make them happy or satisfied, but it

is enough to dampen down and nerf that, um, that impulse. So, and this is what I've called the male sedation hypothesis, and this has been studied. Uh, so why have we not got this, uh, yeah, I'm a legitimate illegitimate academic now. Um, but this is, and there's a, there's a question to be asked there, but you know, everything that you're talking about there that it's triggering, it's playing off the back of this desire for them to, um, work together as a team to have inter-tribal warfare, to create mastery, to increase in status, to be able to accomplish things.

Okay. But it's within the virtual world and you can become an e-gamer and so on and so forth, but how, how much can you cash out that status into the real world? But then a more interesting question comes, which, you know, the game is very well made do and say, well, if I'm enjoying it, why do I need to cash it out into the real world? What is real and what isn't? Why, why is there this sort of weird axiomatic value judgment about the fact

that the real world is better than the virtual world, it's all part of a world. It's all just dopamine serotonin ticking around in my brain. Who cares? Same thing goes for porn. You know, I worried about getting me to, or I don't have the, this thing or whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever. Like all of these things allow them to do that. Couple of white pills that me and a friend, William Costello think with

regards to the AI girlfriend virtual relationship thing, uh, first one being dating and flirting is something that is incredibly anxiety inducing for men. Yes. Created CBT made it so that he could overcome approach anxiety. I don't know if that's really that's supposed to be Aaron Becker. Was this the other guy?

The other dude. Um, right. What's his name? I forget the name. Yeah. David, David told me about him. It was created to, to help with approach anxiety. Maybe Aaron back was it too.

I, everyone's just has a pro. I don't think so. Yeah. Um, but the, uh, the primary challenge that you have in dating is that there is no such thing as practice dating. If me and you want to get better at pickleball, we can go to the local court and you can just hit drives at me and I can practice my drop volley. I can't, it is one of the few things where you practice in public, you learn out loud.

So there's always this high pressure to not fail. And what that means is that men often have really, really, they never get beyond, they never go zero to one. They never actually get that first step done. So me and William think that a really phenomenal and this, you don't even need to wait for the sex robot thing or the whatever, the in-person robot. You could do this with Apple's VR headset. If it was sufficiently well-trained on a good data set. So you have a virtual interaction with a woman, like a computer game.

And in this virtual interaction, the avatar is able to see your movements. They can hear what you're saying. They use natural language processing to work out the intonation and, and you know, they're able to go back and forth and they can, you know, you can program in shit like consent and you can program shit in like flirting and I want to increase the difficulty,

the disagreeability of this girl. I want her to make me work on you level up and level up and level up. And if you can form that on actual human psychology, you can have guys practice playing the video game, the safety of their own home and then go and deploy this in the real world. It's like, you know, tonal, one of these like at home gym things. It's like, or we sports, right? Like, you know, you're playing a video. like at home gym things. Oh, okay. It's like, yeah. Or Wii sports, right?

Like, you know, you're playing a video. That's a better example. You're playing Wii sports at home, you're playing tennis or whatever. And then you go into the room and you're like, Hey, I played a video game, but I'm kind of fitter. And this is the same. I played a video game, but I'm kind of better at flirting. Yeah.

And I think, I think having practice flirting in the virtual world is actually a great idea. I think you're right that it, I remember, you know, when I was in seventh grade and the adults would organize a dance, it was terrifying. You know, and occasionally I would ask a girl to dance and either she'd say yes or no, but it was terrifying. But again, that's that like fear and thrill when she does occasionally say yes.

I agree that in theory we could do that, that the headsets, that the virtual reality, you really could give boys practice flirting with realistic girls and the difficulty level could get harder and harder. Now, how would this actually play out in the real world? I fear that it's not really going to be, hey, let's try to make you into the best possible romantic partner, likely to find a really wonderful woman and they get happily married. I fear that it's going to turn into either here's, you know, the game is to get the woman in bed and then move on to the next woman. And here, you know, we'll teach you how to, how to bed women. Or it's going to be design the woman you want and you're going to, you know, let's make her even lovelier.

Let's give her an even better sense of humor. How about if she never gets mad at me? You know, you program and all these things that are just going to, you know, let's make her even lovelier. Let's give her an even better sense of humor. How about if she never gets mad at me? You know, you program in all these things that are just going to take you in an unrealistic way. So we see over and over again. You've got an evolutionary background. I have to say, I want to bring you back. And once this tour is done, I want to bring you back on.

And if you can remember it to talk about the happiness hypothesis, because it was one of the three books that got me into the world of EP and really sort of made me fall in love with it. But given that background, again, me and William have spoken about this an awful lot. We talked about this AI girlfriend revolution. One of the problems that you have and one of the reasons that I don't think we need

to fear the AI girlfriend thing quite as much is no guy brags about the fact that he is subscribed to some woman's only fans. The reason that you don't brag about it is that there is no status associated with being selected. There is no, you look like a loser. And, but not only that, that even if it didn't, even if it was neutral in the like loser metrics, because you haven't been pre-selected by the gatekeeper is the

price of a cheeseburger per month. Yeah. Therefore anyone has access to this. And because of the access it's, you know, maybe if you have a $30,000 sex robot, it's a flex of your wealth, but it's also like, dude, you spent $30,000 on a sex robot, how weird are you? So, and I just, I don't, I don't know what's going to happen, but I certainly know that that pre-selection, the status associated with a woman who is the gatekeeper

choosing a man who is the protagonist. That accounts for so much of the bragging rights of the guy. Yes. Great. So this brings in a key, a keyword we haven't mentioned is status. And boys are, boys and girls are each competing for status, but boys competition is really much more, it's about ultimately about like physical toughness,

dominance originally and through the primeval state, ultimately backed up by the ability to physically beat the shit out of somebody. But in modern times that gets converted into other ways of contesting. And we've had a long slow evolution of our economy such that we've harnessed male ambition for status and turned it in productive directions. In fact, I was going to write a book, I got a contract to write a book called Three Stories About Capitalism, The Moral Psychology of Economic Life. I was going

to write a book on like the psychology of capitalism. And then the university's melted down and wrote the coddling and I got drawn off into all these other things. But one of the key insights is there's a, is, you know, Adam Smith realized that when you get an economy set up the right way, it's not from the benevolence of the butcher and the baker and the brewer that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own self-interest. When people can get money for doing something that helps others, well then men try very hard to make money. But it's not just money. When you can get

status by doing something productive, that's going to challenge, like men are like rockets. Like they have this incredible capacity for work, but they're often mis-aimed. And so I think it's quite remarkable that, you know, when, you know, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to face off, how do they do it? Who can build the more effective rocket launch system into outer space? I mean, that's a great way for men to compete.

So that's productive. And I think what you're saying, what you're pointing out, is part of dating, I mean part of is very intrinsically motivated. You want a girlfriend, you want sex, you want love, but you also, yeah, you want a hot girlfriend. You want someone that other guys will respect you for because, yeah, I got this woman. So any discussion of boys, yes, we must consider status, especially what are other men going to think of me and also also what are other women gonna think of me based on who I date?

Women are extremely concerned with what other women will think of them as well, separate status competitions. But yeah, that's a key. And video games give them an alternate world in which they can gain status within that alternate world. But I keep coming back to the metaphor of the black hole. Black hole is a place where anything gets sucked in, but nothing comes out. And so, okay, here's another controversial idea. I'll air it with you. Maybe you can disprove it. I'll just put this as a contention. I don't know if this is true.

My contention is that nobody or is that hardly anyone in Gen Z has done anything yet that has really made an impact on the world. Let me just qualify. There are always going to be athletes, always. There are always going to be singers coming along. That's not the issue. The issue is, did you start a company? Did you make some discovery? Did you write an amazing book? Did you do something that the world notices and says like, oh, wow, you know, that's impressive. And when I asked this of audiences, they only come up with two names. So I'll ask you who are the members of Gen Z who've really dented the unit. They've really done something.

When Gen Z start and finish the Gen Z is now 28 years old. So everybody who's 28 years old or younger, it starts in 1996. I'm one year old. I was going to say Boyan slat, the guy that founded and was the CEO of the ocean cleanup, you know, that huge thing that cleans plastic out of the ocean. Oh, that would count. Yeah, he's 29. He's 29.

So he's a millennial. He's in my group. The millennials are creative and productive and mentally healthy, but Gen Z, so wait, try again. I'm sure you're going to come up with the one name that everyone comes up with. What's one person under 29 who really has changed the world? Greta Thunberg. That's it. That's the one everyone comes up with.

And then there's a second that people sometimes come up with. Malala. Who? Malala, uh, the woman Pakistan from Pakistan. She was shot by, you know, fundamentalists, but she survived and she's a, you know, a rights activist. I was never going to get that. Okay. Anyway, so Greta Greta is the one that everyone comes up with. Um, but that's it. So there are no Americans. Um, there are no men. Um, and I started thinking this two or three years ago and I keep waiting.

Someone's going to find me a Gen Z person who's really done something big. Now a lot of them want to start their own business as an influencer, they wanna create an app. So I'm not saying they're not lazy. What I'm trying to say here is as far as I can tell, they have been raised in an economy where what you're desperately trying to do is get more followers, get more influence, and it's all quantified.

And as long as you're working hard at that, you're not generating anything that will leave the black hole of social media, nothing that will affect the world outside of your closed world of people seeking status. I'm sure that you're aware of it, but the percentage of primary school kids that say that they want to grow up to be a YouTuber or an influencer. So, you know, you have the, they're being fed in on the front end with this presupposition and then they're being spat out on the front end with this presupposition,

and then they're being spat out on the backend too, with this lack of impact in the real world. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, maybe this is one of the white pills of automation and AI and delivery. What's a white pill? I haven't heard that term. What does that mean?

So a black pill is something that's nihilistic and it's an insight that makes you feel kind of apocalyptic and fatalistic. And a white pill would be a reason for hope. It's a justification for hope. Oh, nice. Okay. I've got to start developing a few of those because my talks can get kind of dark. So, all right, white pills, go ahead. Yeah, just talking about a white pill.

So a white pill from, and it's particularly useful to use in contrast to something that people see as something that's bad. AI is going to come, it's going to take all our jobs and everyone's going to be, it's going to be the matrix. But one of the advantages is that if we're in this current lull of real world invention, invention from Gen Z maybe, um, the increase in leverage that we have through code means that a smaller number of people can have a larger amount of impact.

So the few that break through from Gen Z and do do great things can maximize and magnify their impact on the world in a way that might be able to compensate for the rest of their generations lack. Okay, that's a good point. I agree that that's possible. But this just sort of slots right into one of my main concerns about what's happening, which is that digital technology and now artificial intelligence is likely to usher in an era of material prosperity.

If we all have an infinite number of servants to help us make whatever we want, yes, there's going to be a rise of productivity. And all these people who point to the coming golden age, they're looking at material prosperity, they're looking at physical health discoveries will cure cancer. Yeah, materially things are going to get better as they have been continuously. You know, Matt Ridley pointed this out, Steve Pinker pointed this out. But I'm a social psychologist and I play sociologist in my spare time because I think what we're heading into is a

sociological apocalypse. That is, all the things it takes to make a stable society, they're not visible. I learned this from the Bill Durkheim and from reading conservative writings. Institutions, structures, traditions, all the things that make our society possible, but many people don't see. And these are being rotted out. And this precedes the internet. I mean, there's the thing, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. So there's been kind of a decline since the World War II was a huge stimulus for all kinds of amazing after effects. And there's a decline since then.

So it's not all caused by the recent technologies, but I think it's been accelerated by it. And so what you're pointing to is, yes, more material prosperity. And yeah, that's true. But if we have collapsing institutions, no trust in anything, and we're willing to consign a generation

to just wasting their time struggling for status on TikTok because as long as 12 of them are creative and create gigantic new things, it will be just as good off as we were 10 years ago. Yeah. So yeah. Okay. Maybe less of a white. That's a gray pill.

That's a gray pill. Oh, good. You know what? Gray pill. Because it's both. It's black and white. I like it. Okay. A zebra pill, a zebra pill. It's striped.

It's striped. Okay. So we've spoken about boys and what's happening with them. You know, there's so much conversation around young teen girl mental health. Give me the latest data. What are you seeing? What's happening with, with the young girls? Sure.

So, I mean, Freya coveredya covered this beautifully and she writes about this beautifully on her Substack Girls. But sort of the big picture here is, let's start with the mental health, but there's a lot more going on. With the mental health, it's very specific for girls. It's what are called internalizing disorders. It's especially depression and anxiety. Other things are up, but like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, they're all up a little bit, but it's really depression and anxiety. Girls suffer more from what are called internalizing disorders. So if there are stresses and problems, they kind of turn it inwards and they suffer anxiety, depression. Boys historically suffer more

from what are called externalizing disorders. there are problems with their development they act out They make other people miserable crime, you know deviance violence So so that's historically the way girls and boys were but what's happened is actually both girls and boys have moved more in the direction Of internalizing disorders, but girls especially so the numbers are hard to believe But they're up around 30 or 40 percent of girls, teenage girls, would qualify as having depression or anxiety disorders. It used to be more like 10 or 15 percent. So it's now a normal thing to be an American or British teenage girl. It's just a normal thing that you think about suicide and you have your anxiety and

you manage your anxiety. It's part of your identity. It's with you all the time. So it's tragic. It's so sad. It used to be the case that middle-aged people were the least happy. It's a well-known thing called the U-shaped curve of happiness. The happiest people used to be young adults, teenagers and young adults, and then people in their 60s and 70s. They're done with the hard work. They get to enjoy their lives. But there's always people in the middle, taking care of kids and parents. That's not true anymore. In Western countries, the young people have plunged, and especially the girls. So we have a graph in the book, Canadian data, young Canadian women used to be the happiest. Now they're by far the least happy group of people in Canada. So for girls, the mental health, the anxiety, depression, that's like the central finding, but there's a

lot more. Oh, your question about that? Go on, go on. Okay. So, you know, so much of the debate is just about the mental health data, but there's so much else that's warping girls' development and making them less happy. The hypersexualization, the pornification of everything, the fact that you've got these young girls on Instagram, aping these millennial women with gigantic boobs and butts and fillers and all kinds of things. This is just really, really bad for them. So even if they don't get depressed and anxious, then they do. But even if they didn't, the fact that they, oh my God, the number of girls now, middle school girls who are using skincare products and who are concerned about their skin and You know and doing makeup tutorials, you know, like no your skin is perfect. Go have fun, you know

Yes, you you'll care about how you look girls. I've always cared about how they look. That's part of life It's part of for boys too, but to take to take these, you know, wonderful sprightly funny you know fifth sixth grade girls, and then suddenly to have them focus so much on their face and their beauty because they're on social media is a tragic loss of girlhood. There's that. There's the exposure to older men, creepy men who want to watch them dance, who want to talk with them. There's the whole economy of nudes from the boys in their class. If the boys will send them a dick pic and then say, come on, send me one of yours. Come on, come on.

Don't be a prude. Don't be a prude. And then if a girl does said anything, now the boys really got something valuable. And we cite, you know, there's a book American Girls, the author documents how middle school boys will get a nude photo of a girl and then they can give it, they can trade it to high school boys for beer. And so the girl's nakedness, the girl's humiliation is valuable to the boy because he can get alcohol and prestige by giving it to an older boy who can buy him beer or get him beer somehow or other. So, you know, the commodification, the hypersexualization, the humiliation of girls once they enter the world of social media, you know, it's just, I mean, it's just on so many fronts that phone-based childhood

is not a human childhood and kids are stuck in it. You have an evolutionary background. You titled the book, The Anxious Generation, of all of the litany of different human emotions that we have. Anxiety is the one that's very prevalent, which is hearing about anxiety disorders and things that are downstream from it.

There's even a disorder now where people can't distinguish between anxiety and depression. Uh, and it means that then I literally learned it yesterday from David Brooks. God damn it. Anyway, it's, they, they struggle to work out the difference between anxiety and depression. So it's bleeding into. Wow. First off, bleeding into. Wow.

First off, from an evolutionary perspective, I think it's a bit of a cope by people with my intellectual interest background of EP to say, well, well, you know, we're built to be vigilant, you know, we've got the smoke detector principle, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, but it's really tuned up now. It's not just tuned up. It's like supercharged. And my question being why anxiety? What is it about the soup, the cocktail of stimulus that we have at the moment the soup, the cocktail of stimulus that we have at the moment that's causing anxiety to be the predominant outcome.

Yeah. So I think it's too many, there are many contributing factors, but two big ones. One is the loss of thrilling play in childhood, which we talked about. If kids don't get to take risks, they don't learn to manage risks. And then any little thing seems threatening. This is why students were suddenly asking for trigger warnings in part, because the idea that a book that describes a Greek myth in which Zeus rapes a woman, can we expect young women to just have to read this? So what is just exposure? If kids don't have exposure when they're young and they don't have thrills and they don't have risk, then any little thing is going to be much harder for them when they're older. That's one piece.

The other is growing up on the stage. You know, when you're growing up, you make a lot of mistakes. You say something stupid to your friend and then your friend might criticize you. Your friend might even get angry at you and then you make up. But when that happens on the stage, you say something, and before you know it, everyone is talking about it, and they're adding on their own comments, and you're the butt of the joke. And as anyone ever knows who's been through any kind of a cancellation attempt

or any kind of public online thing, it's painful in a way beyond anything that we know in terms of physical suffering. It really makes people want to disappear and it is a spur to suicide. So when the entire school is laughing at you, you know, or the photo you sent of your genitals or the thing you said that somebody caught and then added a con, you know. So kids should not grow up on a stage. The British I'm told have a saying, don't put your daughter on the stage Mrs. Worthington. Is this something you've ever heard?

No. Okay, older British people, I believe it's a Noel Coward song from like a hundred years ago, but don't put your daughter on the stage Mrs. Worthington is good advice, especially for girls. And girls are much more anxious than boys. So if a girl grows up, everything she says can be amplified. Every image of her is commented on. She never develops just the basic security to move from minute to minute and hour to hour and person to person, like,

because anything could blow up at any time. People are always judging you. So we have to give kids a normal human childhood if we expect them to develop normal human strengths. What can we do? Ah, good. Because I was just noticing our time is running out. Let's turn to the solutions. And here's my white pill. If we were talking about democracy and American democracy, I'd be all black pill. I think we're, you know, I don't know how we get out of this in American democracy.

When we're talking about the teen mental health crisis, we can get out of it in a year or two. And they've already started in Britain. And here's what you do. Because it's all a series of collective action problems. The reason why fifth graders now are getting smartphones is because all the other fifth graders are getting them. The reason why my students can't quit Instagram and TikTok,

even though they know it's wasting their time and making them anxious. It's because everyone else is on it, so they have to be on it. So these are all collective action problems, and the way you deal with a collective action problem is with collective action. So if we just have four clear norms, four norms, we can solve this. First norm, no smartphone till high school. If you want it, send your kid out. What age is high school? In America, it's around age 14.

So in Britain, the movement is 14. Cause I think you don't have quite the exact cutoff. We have a very clear, almost all schools, it's like, you know, eighth grade is still middle school, early puberty, but then ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th is high school, roughly age 15 to 18. Or 14, 15 to 18. So you know 14, 15 to 18. So if we just delay smartphones till high school,

give them a flip phone, let them communicate with each other and with you as the parents. But to give them the internet in their pockets so that when they're on the bus, they're not talking with other kids, they're flipping through stuff. At lunch, they're flipping through stuff. So no smartphone till high school at the earliest. Two, no social media till 16. This one is gonna be a little harder to get as a norm, but if most of us parents would say, no, you're not getting it until 16,

they can't say, but I'm the only one, I'm excluded. They have to say, half the kids have it, but half don't. Then you say, well, you're gonna be in the half that don't. And before you know it, it'll be a lot more than half that don't. The third norm, phone-free schools. This is a must. And this one we can do this year, this year like this September.

The teachers hate the phones. The principals hate the phones. I ask them, why don't you ban them? Why don't you have the kids lock them up? And they say, because some of the parents will freak out. They demand to be able to contact their kid anytime during class, text them, anything. But most parents are now beginning to see this is messing up our kids. So I'm urging if you're listening to this, if you have kids in school and the school allows kids to have phones on them,

please contact the principal of your kid's school and say, please go phone free. It's messing up their education. It's making them lonely. There's no good that comes from kids having phones in schools. Same thing with access to anything that can text. That's the third norm. The fourth norm is more independence, replay and responsibility in the real world. But you can't just take away the phones and the screens or, you know, reduce it. You can't just like reduce it 80%, let's say, and then say, now sit in your room and look at the wall

or learn how to knit or something. What kids really want, I once read, long ago, I read a book on like the secret life of dogs. Like what do dogs really want? The answer is each other. Like they're pack animals, they really wanna be with other dogs. And the same is true for kids.

What do they really want to hang out with other kids? And so doing that on a video game isn't nearly as satisfying, but try to arrange this so that your kids can really spend a lot of time with other kids unsupervised. No adult telling them what to do. No adult resolving the conflicts. So if we do those four things, no smartphone till high school, no social media till 16, phone-free schools, more independence, responsibility, and free play in the real world. Do those four things. We will roll back the phone-based childhood. This childhood only really came in around 2012.

We've only had it in about 12 years. It wasn't like this in 2008, 2009. So it's not permanent. You know, we can change it and we have to change it because it is devastating our kids. There's no other explanation for the multinational mental health crisis. And with four norms of collective action,

we can act collectively to reverse it. How's that for a white pill? I like it. And I also love the fact that you've inculcated, this new lexicon is just, it's swimming through you. It owns you now and it's staring out through your eyes. That's what happens when you write a book. I'm gonna guess that there'll be a lot of parents listening who have got kids that

may be going to be getting to that age that probably kids get phones now, maybe like eight, nine, something like that. Maybe even earlier, I suppose. Yeah. They get their own iPad. You can't do, we don't have a God's eye view and we can't coordinate perfectly. Would a small scale solution be something like try and speak to your child's friends, parents and say, let's go to a cartel. Let's have this.

I've listened to this phenomenal episode with this great psychologist and this very handsome British dude, they said that we really need to do this. Why don't we, Hey, do you have a watch or read the book? I think it's a generation. Can we get together? We can't do this nationally, but can we do this locally? Presumably that's a good first step. Absolutely.

That's right. That's exactly the thing to do. And there are a number of organizations, almost all started by moms who are helping. So for in the UK, I've only recently learned about delaysmartphones.org.uk and smartphonefreet childhood.co.uk. So those are two organizations

that are trying to help parents do exactly that. Now, of course, if you simply know that you're in touch with the parents of your kids' best friends, which usually you are, you can just text them, you can just call them, you can just talk to them at school pickup or whatever. So yes, coordinating on a small scale will really, really make it easy for you and those other families to give your kids back a play-based childhood.

The goal isn't just to delay the phones. The goal is to give them a play-based childhood. If the school can help and say we're going phone-free and if the principal could say and parents given the latest research you know I urge you to consider delaying you know try to at least wait till high school if the school could give some guidance that really helps set the norm. So this is why I'm so optimistic because the revolution began in the UK last month literally there was an article in The Guardian, you know, these two women, the women who run Smartphone Free Childhood,

they had a WhatsApp group, there was a little publicity, huge numbers of parents, like everyone, the parents hate this stuff, the parents are ready to act. And in Britain, they are rising up and taking matters into their own hands. And my hope is that we're ready to pop in the United States, that in March and April of 2024, everyone will really understand,

like, you know, we know something's wrong here. Let's try to really put our finger on it. And then what do we do? What we do is enact these four norms. Hell yeah. Jonathan Haidt, ladies and gentlemen. Jonathan, I love your work. I've been a fan of it for a very long time.

It's great to finally have you on the show. You're officially a modern wisdom alumni now. Uh, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all your writing and you did a really interesting writing process for this where it is sort of very transparent in a way that is pretty in typical. Yeah. I started a sub stack.

Um, I thought I would never do that because I don't have time to write, but I started a sub stack at after babble.com and Zach Roush and I, we put out all our findings, all our research, all our graphs, invited comment, invited criticism. And now we're bringing in voices like Freya India's and Ricky Schlott. We're bringing Gen Z. So just please go to after babble.com, sign up, subscribe to the sub stack. The website for the book is anxious generation.com. And of course, I hope you'll buy the book itself, anxious generation, you know, sold wherever books are sold.

Oh, yeah, Jonathan, I really appreciate you. Thank you for today. Chris, what fun.