Panic World - Are kids' brains being rotted by screens? (With Michael Hobbes)

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Since the advent of smartphones, a simmering and increasingly boiling panic has been about whether too much “screentime” is ruining the nation’s youth. Michael Hobbes joins us to help trace past moral panics surrounding kids, from such terrifying inventions as the jukebox, to television (okay maybe kinda bad), and texting, up to where we are now: the “Great Rewiring.” That’s the theory as younger generations are exposed to technology at earlier and earlier ages, it fundamentally changes how they approach the world, and other people. But is it really rotting their brains? Our guest Michael Hobbes is a journalist and podcast host. You can find his work on his Substack “Confirm My Choices,” or his podcasts “If Books Could Kill” and “Maintenance Phase.” Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A friend of mine has been doing this thing where he's like, okay, social media break. It's like a little introvert break for everybody to just sort of like step back, check emails. Like a smoke break. Like genuinely. And then you have like 20 minutes of kind of alone time to sort of recharge. That does sound really nice. I want to remind people that I have cooler friends elsewhere. And I want them to see me interacting with those people.

I have to tell my friends what celebrity is young at me on the internet. Yes, exactly. This is most of my conversation with my friends. Today we're talking about a subject that is especially hard to debunk. It's built up by a question of. methodology and the people who believe in it are genuinely very annoying. But it feels like it could be true and it's a real rat's nest. And that's why we brought in someone who I consider to be the best debunker in the game.

Michael Hobbs, I am a massive fan. Welcome to the show. I'm the completest of your podcast, Uvra. I think you are. Yeah, I'm a super fan. Thank you for being. I will connect you with my mom. And you guys can talk about my benefits and faults.

I would love to. Actually, that sounds really nice. What annoys you about Mike? Actually, like an evil list. I'm Ryan Broderick and welcome to Panic World, a show about the various witch hunts, moral panics, and viral freakouts that bubble up out of the weirdest, most confusing corners of the internet.

And today we are investigating whether teenagers' brains are really being rewired by our smartphones and social media. By the time you hear this episode, you will have no doubt seen someone on the internet moaning about Jonathan Heights's new book, The Anxious Generation, and how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.

But let's get a sense of what this discourse has sounded like. This is a clip from PBS. God, PBS, really? God, that's bleak. Yeah, from PBS. Yeah, they're very excited about this. What we do is hand you this device. So this is about the worst thing you can imagine

to give kids at the beginning of puberty. And the great rewiring radically altered the inputs to children, taking away most of what they used to do, most of their older inputs, including other people, and swapping in screens. These claims have caused a lot of pearl clutching, like among parents. And that's, of course, why this book is a bestseller. The book's data is not great. The boldest claims are pretty suspect.

Although, you know, hey, just because he might be wrong about a lot, doesn't mean there isn't a problem. And I do think we can agree that there is a mental health crisis for pretty much everybody, including teens right now. And there's not a lot of legislation that addresses any of it. especially when it comes to minors. So what do we do? Anything? I mean, the things that height suggests are...

Okay, well, I didn't actually read the book. I should be really clear about this. But I did read a lot of his interviews, and I did ruin my YouTube algorithm by watching a lot of his appearances on Joe Rogan. Maybe this is the real thing that rewires your brain. Maybe it's listening to fucking Joe Rogan and, like, reactionary centrist on interview podcasts.

This might be it. But we're also not focusing on his book today. We're focusing on the larger conversation that his book slots into. So let's start here. How did you become aware of Jonathan's work? Good God. I've been following this sort of like metamoral panic for years now.

Basically kids these days, there's a lot of these. I don't want to get demographic about it, but like these kind of middle-aged white guys who just complain all the time about how college students are too coddled and they can't handle challenging ideas, et cetera. And so Jonathan Haidt and Greg Luki-A. Inoff wrote an article in the Atlantic, I believe in 2015, called The Coddling of the American Mind, which is exactly what it sounds like. We're raising a generation of kids who can't handle

anything, and they've been spoiled, so they're super fragile and they get to college, and they just, like, you know, freak out and melt down at, like, the slightest pushback. And then they expanded that into a book that we covered on my podcast. It books kill and, like all these other books. It's basically just like a moral panic book. He's now kind of made this. I don't even know if it counts as a pivot, but the sort of evolution into... to the cell phones ruining kids' brains, which is this extension of the argument that, you know, young people today can't handle anything, blah, blah, blah, they're all ruined. But now it's like this kind of next, kind of maybe ongoing perpetual moral panic about

the use of technology and teenagers. Haidt claims that this is not just another moral panic. This is something totally different, guys, I swear. Would it surprise you if I told you that we've been having this exact, not moral panic, about technology and young people for almost 100 years now? Yeah, this is what I was going to say, is that I've looked up enough moral panics that, like, you find moral panics about the automobile and teenagers using it to have sex. You find moral panics about the jukebox and people are going to be dancing to music in bars and like, what if your white daughter is dancing with like a black guy? This is like a really gross moral panic that took over.

It's like every time we have a new technology, there's a huge panic about youth. I feel like we're roughly the same age. We both grew up during this like TV panic. Like TV was going to make us all illiterate and TV makes us all very stupid. And I mean, maybe it did, honestly, but... I'm very happy that you did a very Michael Hobbsian thing. You took my segue here. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.

No, it's perfect. So we did put together a little timeline of these panics. So let's run through them and compare them to what height has said about teens in the Internet. In 1953, we had the TVs making people stupid and lazy, which, I mean, honestly, sounds right to me. That's what did it to me. Here. Here's a clip. It is a kind of nursing home view of entertainment. The bedside manner, formerly used only for rich, foolish old women, is now laid on for millions.

1988, we've got Walkman or isolating people and causing accidents. Ooh, that's good. I haven't heard that one before. On every American street, thousands go about their business tuned into their favorite sounds. Harmless, peaceful, you might think, with just the occasional slightly freaked out music lover. Not so, according to the town elders of Woodbridge, a hitherto obscure New Jersey suburb, which believes in saving its citizens from any possible danger. And Woodbridge is basking happily in the publicity brought on by being the first council to ban the little electronic monsters.

In 1988, we have a Chicago Tribune article about beepers. And I would love for you to read, I'm going to put this quote in the chat here. I would love for you to read this section from the Chicago Tribune in 1988 about beepers. Dude, hell yeah. Remember, uh, remember the beeper codes? You do like star, what was it like star 69 or like 911? Uh, it says, if kids have beepers, it means they are dealing drugs, says Alderman William Beaver's sponsor of the ordinance.

I know that because I come from the streets. If a kid has a beeper and isn't a doctor or a lawyer, then he must be a witch doctor. Ooh, threw that in there at the end. That's a nice little tale. I love that, that this presupposes that. there are kids walking around with beepers in 1988. Yeah, I think that's pretty great. They were drug dealers in 1998, to be fair.

Later on, it was more mass. But at the time, yeah, fair. It's like people that carry cash now. Yeah, if I saw a guy with the beeper now, I'd be like, I could probably buy a drink. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like anytime I have to pay for something in cash, I'm like, you just think I was selling cocaine all day because that's the only reason. It's the only reason to have this.

Or you're like a very shady contract. Yeah. But yes. So skipping ahead a little bit, we kind of all know the TV. panics of the 90s, but in the 2000s, things get really good. So we've got the Guardian writing that texting will destroy the English language. And they have a back and forth example of two teenagers texting. Now, do you want to be ROM, which I believe is short for Romeo or Jewel, which is short for

Juliet? I'll be Juliet. Okay, cool. So, ROM, RUF2T, which means are you free to talk? Okay, which means make your move, but no, it doesn't. Just to remind it, this is the Guardian's example of how teens are texting in 2002. Then Rom replies, BF, question mark, which means do you have a boyfriend? And then Juliet says no, which means liar.

That's very interesting. Does she think he's lying or she's lying? She's lying. I think she's playing hard to get, right? Okay. So then Romeo says C, like the letter C, the letter U, the letter A, and then three, which apparently means see you anytime, any place, anywhere. And then Juliet just says at, at symbol, club, at the club, which I don't think you need a translation for. That just means at the club.

No, I think we, that sounds right. And then Romeo finishes this with okay, but he, what? He thinks, I guess. They're saying that, like, he's thinking great with an eight, six, two with a two night, N-I-T-E, which means great sex tonight. I like that even in his thoughts, he's abbreviating the words and using numbers instead, even in like the translation. This requires like inception of brackets, yeah. Well, is it possible that his brain has been rewired? That's your segue way back, isn't it?

Oh, no, we got more of this, because this stuff is my favorite. This is why I built this whole episode around this stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good, good, good, good. I also can I say this is like a super duper moral panic of your, this friend or this, this member of my book club, dug up this thing where somebody, I don't even know when it's from, this guy complaining about the invention of the sundial. This is on some like old cuneiform tablet. And he's like, in my day, we used our bellies to know what time it was. But now we have this sundial that it's like trying to stand.

standardized time. Your belly. Yeah, like, I guess it's lunch time when I'm hungry for lunch, and it's dinner time when I'm hungry for dinner or something. And it's like, these are literally people like the boomers of your complaining about the concept of like standardized time. I just think it's like there's nothing people will not complain about if it's a new technology. That's truly so sick.

I actually think that we should abolish clocks and just go by the circadian rhythms of our stomach. The thing is that's so good. The clocks did rewire our brains. So on that level, fair enough. There was probably an airport bestseller back in the day about that. Yeah, like a cuneiform tablet. They read it on the way to the ferry, I guess, because there's no airplanes.

Okay, so back to our timeline of adults freaking out about children using the technology. So in 2005, things do get a little darker. And as we go through this timeline, things are getting darker because obviously technology is becoming like sort of more important. And in 2005, there is a civil suit after a disturbed teenager shoots and kills three people after he played grand theft auto. It's very sad. Unfortunately, this is how 60 minutes opened the segment. See a car you like, stealing. Someone you don't like, stomper.

A cop in your way? Blow him away. It is 360 degrees of murder and mayhem. Slickly produced, technologically brilliant, and exceedingly violent. Okay, so you get the idea. Luckily, video games stopped progressing after Grand Theft Auto. So that's as violent as video games get, you know, that we haven't gotten any crazier there. That was like one polygon per murder.

This is like early PlayStation 1. Yeah, what was that, Vice City? Yeah, which honestly, Vice City, that game rips. Now I kind of want to play it. But I think it's a really good example of how like whatever is happening at the moment. We sort of, we tend to kind of reverse engineer these panics onto that. And my favorite example, an example that I have held near and dear to my heart for years now. Do you know about the daily male My Chemical Romance protests in the UK?

What? No. I barely even know about my chemical romance. Okay. So my chemical romance, one could argue they're the Nirvana of the millennial generation, the very influential emo ban. I feel like Nirvana is the Nirvana of the millennial generation, but go ahead. I'll let you go. Also, also, you could argue that too.

So My Chemical Romance, they're very popular in mid-2000s, and the British tabloids do what the British tabloids do. They sort of wage this tabloid war against emo culture. And they start linking it to all of these suicides and saying that My Chemical Romance in particular is making children harm themselves. And eventually, the My Chemical Romance fans had reached a tipping point. And can you click the link I just sent you and describe the top image there because it's this is outside the Daily Mail office in 2008 in London. Emo runs high as fans defend band against Daily Mail. And it's a photo of two young teens, probably like 14 years old, both girls. Yeah.

And one of them told me a sign says, we're not a cult, we're army, the MCR me. Oh, I get it. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. The kids are right. The kids are fine. These people are like 44 now. Yeah, yeah.

They have their own podcast now. Yeah, yeah. These people work for Amazon. They're like middle managers at Amazon now. It's fine. Exactly. The photos from this protest are so great because it is like, it is dozens of emo kids camped out in front of the Daily Mail being like, this is ridiculous. There's nothing dangerous about emo.

Like, we're actually building a community this way. And I think it's just such a fantastic example of picking the most random thing that whatever are teenagers into it, any given moment, any given technological error, and be like, no, no, it's hurting them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And also it's a way of reaching for something, I guess, sort of ideological or cultural, when much more proximate explanations are available, right? Like the rise of school shootings in America is mostly about the availability of guns and just

like this country is awash in guns. But it's like every time something happens, you know, we wanted to blame it on Marilyn Manson or we want to blame it on video games or something, like something is wrong with the youth, rather than there's this kind of non-ideological, logistical factor that explains all of this stuff. It's kind of the same with like, you know, we have very different patterns of suicide in the United States than other countries do. And that's mostly because of like our mental health system, the increased availability of opioids. There's all kinds of reasons that we have different patterns of these things, but they're not like our kids are worse than they are in Germany or something. But this idea that it is worse and the feeling that it must be.

really kicks into gear around 2012, 2012, 2013, because, and Heights's work kind of is largely based on this, this feeling that something changed about 15 years ago. We don't know what it is. And so this is a quote from him, sort of trying to articulate this technological shift that he's now sort of blaming everything on. And I think it's a really interesting look into kind of his grand thesis in a way. I'll read it here. So in 2008, the app store comes out. In 2009, push notifications come out.

So now you have this thing in your pocket, which thousands or millions of companies are trying to get your attention with and trying to keep you on their app. In 2010, the front-facing camera comes out. In 2010, Instagram comes out, which was the first social media app designed to be exclusively used on the smartphone. I don't know where he got that. I had this actual problem as I was listening to more and more of his interviews that I was starting to take notes trying to debunk every single line. And then I was like, wait, no, like, I will ruin the episode this one. But he continues. So the environment that we were in suddenly changed.

Now the iPhone isn't just a tool. It is actually a tool of mass distraction. And we're adults. We can deal with it. Adult mental health did not tank. The story for teens is completely different. The adults are just storming the Capitol. I feel like the idea that the adults are fine with the Internet and it's had all these

effects on kids. A little dubious, John. Nothing bad ever happened by you. giving my parents Facebook. Yeah, exactly. Everyone is fine. Politics are fine. There's definitely not like millions of old people praying to AI pictures of Jesus on

Facebook right. Yeah, yeah. Just type in Facebook voter fraud into that search bar and just look at how, look at how peer and wholesome it is in there. It's totally fine that our, RFK is, you know, being talked about. Yeah. That's fine. But the thing is, and this is why I kind of,

love this quote from him is because he's, he's creating this like very seductive timeline, very fast and loose with what's happening. And you're going on like, oh, okay, yeah, that sounds right. And we all do kind of accept in a certain way that mental health is bad right now, especially for kids. And we're kind of ignoring all of the other things that might be contributing to this. And you alluded to some of them, but, you know, let me, let me throw a few more world enders at you. We never really recovered from the 2008 recession. In 2007, we coined the term eco-anxiety to start describing like the idea that the world might literally end. School shootings basically happen all the time except for that brief window where everyone was locked down for COVID.

And once again, the opioid crisis, the fentanyl crisis, which is sort of replacing that right now. And I don't really blame teenagers for wanting to use their phones all the time. Being outside is horrible. Even if it's not a bad day, it still costs like $40 to do anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No kidding. You've done a lot of reporting about this. Sort of like, you know, this shift in technology and kind of like how people are reacting to it.

Like, when was the kind of the first time you started to notice like the personal kind of impact of technology? Like, like, what was your kind of reporting like back during this great shift? Well, I think, I mean, I always use the paradigm of I read this book years ago, which I wish I could remember the name of. But it was about the adjustment to the invention of the pretextment. printing press, right? That it was this transformative technology that transformed politics and religion and economics and governance and everything else. But it took a while. So it's, you know, it's kind of century-long period of people adjusting. There's this long adjustment period to this transformative technology. And I think we're living through a similar

adjustment period now, which I think is going much faster. It's like we have, you know, different technologies of how fast the Internet is. We then have things like the rise of social media, which when you think about is very recent, right? It's only decade and a half ago. And the mass adoption of it is even shorter ago. And we're doing all this adjusting, and nobody knows what the new equilibrium is going to be. And so you're seeing all these transformations of education and politics and economics and the workforce. And like, things are changing. And it's like, I don't think anybody really knows where it's going to land.

And I think in a period of uncertainty like that, especially for older people, it's easy to look around and go, like, this is different. And the experience of childhood and adolescents have changed so much since we were kids, right? even like I grew up in like the beeper era. And even that was like this unprecedented. Did you have a beep? Dude, I totally had a beeper. Yeah. And like people,

there was a kid in my high school that had like different beeper like case covers to match his clothes. Sick. I thought it was like the most decadent thing. That's so good. If he was wearing a red shirt, he did like a red like little beeper holster. And I was like this is bananas. But now we all have his phone cases, right?

So like, true. He was only cutting edge. Custom beeper cases for like your outfit would do so well. Oh, yeah, incredible. I know. Like, yeah, now they just have a different Stanley Cup for everything. Well, you can attach the beeper to the Stanley Cup.

Yeah. Have you seen the, yeah, seen those? Well, when did you start to notice it? When did you get radicalized on this stuff? One of the first times I ever noticed it was when I was sent out to cover a story on location. I went to Lakeland, Florida in 2013 because this girl had been bullied to the point where she like climbed up a cement mixer, jumped off and killed herself. She was really young, like 13.

God, yeah, I know. There's been a lot of stories like that. It's awful. Yeah. And to bring that back to the Daily Mail, all of these British tabloids were blaming this case on Ask FM. Do you remember Ask FM? No. It was one of the very first apps that let you anonymously ask people questions.

Okay. And so what the tabloids had been saying was that this girl was bullied so mercilessly on Ask FM that she killed her. Oh, God. So I went down to Lakeland and I spent like a week there interviewing her friends and family and I like went to this insane PTA. meeting where like the local sheriff gets up there and he's like obviously he's distraught he's like this middle-aged guy you know thick florida accent and he's like describing this idea that like teenagers could like come into your home digitally and like bully your children and he's like giving advice on how to like turn off the Wi-Fi okay and like all the all the families in town are like talking

about like technology like this like this alien spaceship had landed in the town and made their children insane. And then like, I don't know, after a couple days of interviewing people, like what just became really clear to me was that like the technology wasn't inventing something new. The girls that were bullying this one girl were known bullies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they had just found out a way to bully her more. And the only sort of new twist here was that like the girl couldn't control herself to turn off the Ask FM thing. But then when she finally did, they just found other avenues. Yeah. There's more ways for kids to reach each other with bullying. which does actually feel like a shift.

Right. But also, yeah, it's, it's a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. Yeah. And it's like, in certain ways, it almost makes it almost like easier to kind of ignore some of this stuff. Because, like, you can just turn the screen off. But, like, all of the incentives are all screwed up. And everyone in the town was more than happy to kind of blame it on this. I think it was like a Romanian or Estonian app that was.

And, you know, no one even remembers Ask FM anymore. Well, I also, this also gets to something that I always try to stress in this, too, is that, like, you know, there's been moral panics around things like the automobile, but the automobile was a transformative technology. And, like, the internet is a transformative technology. And I think that, you know, like, kids have more access to pornography, like, unprecedented access to pornography. They have unprecedented access to each other, right? Whether that's positive experiences or negative experiences. And, like, I do think the sort of structure of bullying has actually changed. And so you don't want to, like, over-debunk this stuff and be like, L-O-L-L. the phones don't mean anything. I think it is really meaningful and the nature of adolescence has really shifted. But the problem is that then we get these people like Jonathan Haidt, who are picking up on all of these anxieties. And there's like kind of very obvious and true thing that internet is a big deal. And then he comes around. He's like, what if it confirms everything you already believe? What if it confirms that the kids are ruined and they can't handle anything anymore? And then he's basically telling you something that you want to believe rather than having like actual academics lead this

conversation. And like, I've spoken, you know, over the months, I've spoken to various academics who've researched this. And I have not heard anyone who's an expert in this, like teen mental health, say that it's like just the phones. Like it's, it's in there. It's one of the factors, probably, but it's really difficult to study. And it's way, way, way too early to say anything definitive. But you know what? That hasn't stopped people on Twitter from figuring out how to monetize this for Hey Click. Wait, really? And that's what we're about to talk. Yeah. So this is, this is a bit, this is, I'm a big fan of sort of like naming, naming, genres of viral content, you know?

Like, and so like the, one of the, the most popular kind of forms of like horrible guy on X.com right now is like the guy who shares a chart and is like, the world is over which way Western man kind of thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have two to show you. So this one, they've kind of turned it into a meme, but I think the base chart is, is worth talking about here. So it's titled Young Male Virginity on the Rise.

You've probably seen this one going around. This one was big. And it's basically showing that around 2008, all men became virgins, according to this screenshot. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was hoping it was going to be the ball tanning thing because I'm already doing that. I have that under the table. You can't see it on the Zoom here. Your tanning balls.

Yeah, we watched the end of men for my other podcast. And there's the testicle red light thing. Oh, no, because I do the butthole and the sun thing. Oh, okay, that's what you're doing right now. That's great. So our two machines are harmonizing right now in the background. Exactly, yeah. I thought our energies were synceded.

Yeah, this fucking thing. Yeah, I have thoughts, but I'll let you go. Let me show you, let me share one more here because then I kind of want your take on both. So this is another one that's been traveling around forever, and it's titled percent of teens who say they go out with friends two plus times a week. And once again, it's showing a precipitous drop right around 2008. Okay. It just says data gathered from eighth graders. Hey, that's, that's it, right?

Like, that's how data science works. We got it for math graders. Easy, piz. Okay. So, what is the average person supposed to do when they see, like, a graph that's been yanked out of context and is just being shoved in their feeds? Because this is happening all the time now. And almost all of them are just like, young men are virgins and weird incels.

And it's technology and or women's fault. And no one goes outside anymore. And that's why you need to invest in the metaphors. Yeah. These all kind of go back that direction. And here's an ape that you can buy. Yeah. If you buy my crypto coin, your son will get laid outside.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is my biggest problem with this whole thing is that people, I think because it's simply more interesting, I think people jump to the debating the causes of a phenomenon stage before we establish that the phenomenon is true. So in this first chart about young male virginity on the rise, it goes, you know, it skyrockets in 2008, and then by 2018, it's like triple what it was. But if you look at the 1989 to 2008 period, it's also. jumping all over the place, right? So it goes from 7% to 15% and then back to 8% and then 15%

and then 9% and then 15%. When you see a spiky line like that in data, what that usually indicates is it's a really small sample and it's just kind of all over the place. And so this is from the general social survey and the general social survey is notorious for having very small samples of like sub sub-sub-sub-groups. So this is men under 30 who report zero female sex partners since they turned 18. That's a really small group of people, right? That's not, that's not everybody, right? And so you can have little sampling differences year to year, or a couple kind of outliers or flukes that make it look like there's this huge societal trend. And so we've had a ton of these trend stories about like, why aren't young people having sex

anymore? And most of them are based on the general social survey and this really, really, really small like sub sub-sub-sub-sample. And this phenomenon, this entire trend does not show up in bigger data sets and better data sets. So we have other surveys that ask people, how often are you having sex? How often are you dating, et cetera, from like Pew and Gallup and other places. And like, we don't see this. So this entire phenomenon appears to be a fluke with the general social survey. It's not actually a trend. So we just need to sort of, before we get to like, maybe it's the phones, maybe it's this, maybe it's that. We just need to ask, like, is this really happening? And it's not clear to me that it is. It's 10 weird guys who haven't,

ever talk to a woman and they're bringing every the whole data set down yeah exactly we just got we got to do it this is a really hard group to sample and so you just have you just have spiky numbers because it's very suspicious that it goes from 7% to 15% and then back to 8% that in itself in three years is really weird right so it's like you just right you just have to like sort of take a step back and be like what are we actually talking about here and like look like once again like technology is it changing the way that we we sort of relate to each other intimately. Absolutely.

Every polycule, every polycule now has got a Google calendar and a Trello board. In my day, they were four people and now they're seven. Huge. I do think at a certain level technologically, like running a polycule and running like a tabletop RPG campaign is like functionally the same. The invention of Google Doodle did more to rewire our brains and change polycules than anything else. At a certain point, you're just sort of expressing desires on a Discord channel and like whatever

happens after that is like your business. Now that we've established a baseline on these kinds of moral panics about technology and the kind of discourse they've caused historically, let's see if Jonathan Heights's grand theory is any better than these graphs telling us that Western civilization is doomed. And we're going to do that right after the break. Hell yeah. Hey, this is Grant, the producer of Panic World. We have a little problem.

On our Patreon, there's new content. There's video content, in fact. I, some people are mad. Some people are threatening, and I cannot say exactly what that content is. So how do I describe this without getting into some real trouble? Ryan cooked poultry. The chicken is now totally submerged. He might have had a cold.

I'll do one little splash. My windows are open. I'm probably going to run a fan because, I don't know what the fumes are going to be like. He might, maybe, who's the say? Only you can say if you see our, go to our Patreon. He might have done something that maybe six people have ever been dumb enough to try. Okay, and now I'm going to put on my mask because the CDC says that the fumes that come out of this are actually very dangerous.

It's patreon.com slash panic world. Don't tell people what's there. We'll tell your friends, but have to be it. them be cool. It's incredible how bad it stinks in the area. Patreon.com slash panic world. So Jonathan Haidt has published four books, but his third book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which I believe you're an expert in. Is that correct? My podcast co-host read it, so yes.

Yes. You had it described to you on a podcast. I listened and reacted. Honestly, with the way books sales go these days, like that counts as real. Yeah, if you see it in an airport. That's basically you're 80% of the way there. It's right. But it was a New York Times bestseller, and I think it really distills his entire political project. And I want to see if I got this correct as an expert, as someone who's had to describe to you.

It seems like his three main points are, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker, always trust your feelings, and life is a battle between good people and evil. Does that sort of feel like the... These are what he says are the canonical beliefs of, you know, these coddled. college students. And none of those are actually the canonical beliefs of like anyone I've ever met. Right. He calls him these great untruths that like everyone believes this. Everyone thinks that you should be sheltered from things and you should trigger warnings and safe spaces. But like people do not, people do not talk like this. I don't find on the left there to be too much just like good and evil. Like no shades of gray thinking. I just don't see any of these things around me.

In my tabletop RPG polycule, we do talk that way. With orcs, I make an exception. It's fine. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But what I really, what I really think is funny about sort of this era of his, his grift, if I can say that, that is my personal opinion.

Please do not sue us. Is that there's a chapter about controversial speakers being disinvited from like campuses. So obviously he's talking about like Milo Yanopolis and all these people. And he sort of settles on like a very funny dynamic when you think about what he's now kind of known for. Because he's essentially saying, like teenagers are over-coddled and oversensitive and we need to like blast them in the face with fascism all the time because like they need they need a reality check. It makes this extremely bold claim that we have an entire generation that is ruined that is

not not set out for adult life. And then all of the actual evidence for this is just a series of like low stakes anecdotes from college campuses. Like they protested the speaker. And then oftentimes when you look up the anecdotes, they don't even hold up to like five minutes of scrutiny. They're like, oh yeah, this was just like a normal protest. or it was one student who walked out or something like that.

But then he's also like teens are too weak to handle phone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which like is incredibly fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The through line is just like the kids are terrible, which I think it works on this kind of emotional register or this like anxiety register. But intellectually it doesn't make any sense.

I mean, he makes the comparison to like peanut allergies. Where like because, I mean, this is like a theory that because kids aren't exposed to peanuts, they're all allergic now. Dude, it's so. fucking where they throw that in with their like kids want safe spaces now and they're all allergic to peanuts but like if you're allergic to peanuts you will die that's not like a that's not like a snowflake thing like you do actually have to like that's like a real thing like accommodate people who have that allergy but it's like if the whole point is that we're supposed to just pepper people constantly

with slurs then which he essentially literally says in the book shouldn't we also be peppering them with images of like skinny women and like if they get an eating disorder then like wait that's your problem you're just coddled you didn't see enough images of skinny women before Well, my guess would be that he stopped thinking like that around 2018 when the Democrats started to do better. Yeah, yeah. And now that the Democrats are doing fairly well, all things considered. And Trump isn't on Twitter all day. He doesn't want the teens to use the phone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get out the phones. That would be my little guess. Yeah. But it is funny how he basically went from, we need to like make these kids tough to now we have to coddle them to the point where they can't use a screen anymore. And unfortunately for us, although fortunately for this podcast, that has generated a sickening amount of discourse this year. I feel like I have been blasted in the face by this book on every feed. And I was hoping you, the Discourse Master, could kind of sum up like what you've seen on your various feeds about this book, like this newest one.

The general reaction, I guess, I would say, to the rewiring of the mind. One thing that I find very frustrating about this, this sort of trance of pundit, this like reactionary centrist pundit, where it's like, allegedly they're on the left and they always say, I'm a liberal, but they only actually say that before but, but, and they say something conservative, right? They don't do anything to advance a liberal project or like stand up for liberal values. It's only ever defending conservatives. Michael, Michael, Michael, they were liberal until the leftist changed what being a liberal man. Exactly. Until they were betrayed by me, specifically. Exactly.

It's like, you. Yeah. You see all of these institutions like The Daily Show, et cetera, treating him as a serious person when, you know, his last book was kind of like laughable. And if you actually look into any of its claims, none of them check out, right? And so there's supposed to be this mechanism where it's like, oh, you've kind of like beclowned yourself. And we're just not really going to take you seriously. But again, I think because he's telling people something that they want to hear, you know, he has an interview in the New Yorker. He's on the daily show.

He gets a profile in the New York Times. all of the institutions are propping him up as someone worth listening to, even though, even like a cursory glance at the actual content of his work and also like the project of his work reveals that it's, to me, it doesn't seem like it's being done in good faith, or at least it doesn't match up with what any of the academic literature says. And so to me, I've just seen this whole thing of like the phones are ruining the kids, independent of what the actual research says. And the research paints a much more complicated and I think much more interesting picture. But people just want this very simple message of kids, phones, bad. So it's interesting. My theory, after sort of digging into his work over the last couple weeks to prepare for this, is that like he's not writing a book for teens.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's projecting onto teenagers the way he feels, the way adults feel. And to support this accusation that I'm, I have hurled. Here's a little back and forth from his New Yorker interview. So David Remnick, oh, here, hold on. Do you want me to be David or Johnson? You, you, you, you, you, you, you, you'd be David here. So this is, this is David here. So, yeah, and PR voice. When I think back on my own adolescence, there was a lot of watching television, a lot of wasting time. Was that so much more

socializing or psychologically healthy than spending time with the smartphone? I, I, I hate what he's about to say. I listened this and I, I raged, I raged my, I raged to my computer screen. Some of the greatest moments of my life have been watching TV with friends. Okay, so here we go. Well, watching TV, though our parents complained about it when you look back on it. My recollection was that it was actually, that it was usually social. You're with another person.

You're talking about the show. You're going to stop and go get something to eat. So you're together. It's social. Now what happens? I've heard stories from Gen Z. They go over to their friend's houses sometimes, not that much. And they're on their phone separately.

One might be watching her shows on Netflix. One might be checking out her social. So even when they're physically together, there's a wonderful phrase from the sociologist Sherry Turkle. Because of our phones, we are forever elsewhere. We're never fully present. Now, hold on. I have a thing.

I think the use of her pronouns in this is like so insidious because like all of this shit that he's talking about is gender. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And two, I love sitting on the computer with someone else sitting on a computer next to me. Yeah. That's a great feeling. Yeah. Two words, Jonathan, fall guys. I feel like people are using their phones to do a lot of social things.

And also, TV was not particularly social. I mean, sometimes it was. Like, we would sometimes play like Mega Man together as kids. But oftentimes I would also just sit there and like play Duck Hunt by myself. It's like, it's weird to say with no evidence that these phenomena are completely different. And one of the things that he does here is you see this kind of slippage between him talking about smartphones specifically and screen. screen time. And you also find this in the academic literature where a lot of the literature, and you know, on which he is basing his claims about cell phones, like cell phones are making

us, like shortening our attention span, making us depressed. A lot of that is based on literature around, quote unquote, screen time, which is a really bad marker, right? Because screen time also includes, like, doing homework on the computer. You know, kids are reading research articles and writing papers. And then a lot of the studies on screen time also include things like video games and, like, writing emails to your friends. And he is, like, he is, like, throwing this in there, you know, these results to say, oh, the smartphones are really bad, but the research is not about smartphones in many cases. So he's just making these claims when, like, it actually matters what you're talking about. And I think very similarly to the,

the TV panic, if you read amusing ourselves to death, which has aged terribly, he basically draws the line between like everything you do on TV is bad and making you dumber, and everything you read is good and making you smarter. And we look at that, we go, well, no, I mean, there's like, there's like David Attenborough documentaries on TV, and there's like, fucking airport books that like make you actively dumber. Like some things you watch on TV are fine and some things are not fine. It's much more granular than that. And he's doing the same thing where it's like if it's on the phone, it's bad and isolating

and making you depressed. And if it's not on the phone, it must be good. Like watching TV is so social. And it's like it actually just kind of depends specifically what you're doing on the phone. And I think it's like so telling that like in all of his interviews there's always this moment where like clearly the interviewer has been like nostalgic abated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they start to sort of like talk about their own feelings.

And then he sort of talks about his own feelings and his own past. And then he just sort of starts to extrapolate. Yeah. And he's like, well, my thing good. You think bad. Yeah. And it was like, oh, yeah, that's so good. That's so true.

But I do want to sort of knock this down real good with a fantastically vicious rebuttal from Candice L. Ogder's, a professor of psychological science at the University of California who wrote in nature, height supplies graphs throughout the book showing the day. that digital technology use and adolescent mental health problems are rising together. On the first day of the graduate statistics class I teach, I draw similar lines on a board that seem to connect two disparate phenomena. And I ask the students what they think is happening. Within minutes, the students usually begin telling elaborate theories about how the two phenomena

are related, even describing how one could cause the other. The plots presented throughout this book will be useful in teaching my students the fundamentals of causal inference and how to avoid making up stories by certainly looking at trends. I mean, this is the fundamental correlation causation problem because, like, it is true, and he always points to this that, like, kids that are lonelier say that they use their phones more, but are they using their phones more because they're lonelier or are they lonelier because they're using their phones more? And that kind of data doesn't tell you that. No. If you read the literature, it appears to be that there are some kids that are, like, very, very heavy cell phone users and, like, very, very depressed. But that's a relatively small percentage of kids.

And so if that goes from, like, 3% to 4% of kids, that might show up in the average of the, you know, the statistics, but we're still talking about like a subgroup of kids. It's like at every level, this phenomenon is just much more granular and much more complex than he makes it out to be. I think it's like cigarettes where like if you're a teenager smoking like one or two cigarettes a month, like that's cool. But if you're smoking a lot of cigarettes, like you're probably like the weird kid that no one wants to talk to.

And so it's a balancing act, I think, with everything. Dude, I try to start smoking so many times and I'm too much of a pussy. And I just like, just. It just sucked. I wanted it so bad because it does look cool. It does objectively look cool. I think that's the real takeaway from today's episode is that like smoking is cool. Smoking is cool.

Like more teens should do it instead of using their phone. No downsides. I'm racking my brain for a downside right now. Nothing. Yeah. That's what really killed the third place. That's what really killed the third space, which is a cigarette. Yeah, exactly.

We can't do it inside anymore. So by and large, in the press splits, I think height was just selling people's prejudices back to them. mean the internet is a problem-free zone. Obviously not. So after the break, we're going to look at height solutions and see what our wonderful leaders in government are doing to protect the children. Do do-do-do-do. Okay. Currently, if you're 13 or just able to click a box and lie and say you're 13 on the internet, all your data is collected, you're targeted with an algorithm that sends you all kinds of stuff to keep your attention. And like, you're probably miserable all the time when that

happens because, like, that's the hell that we live in. And, uh, you know, You think that like coming up with solutions for that would be would be fun and and and more imaginative but the people who who are like height don't really have good ones. Here are four solutions, a four-step solution for helping children with technology from Jonathan Hyde. Okay. So number one, no smartphones before high school. Okay.

Number two, no social media before the age of 16. Okay. Number three, phone free schools. And number four, increased amounts have ended up. play and responsibility in the real world. How do you feel about this comprehensive regulatory plan? I got to say, I mean, to be honest, I actually agree with all of those. But I also, I don't know that laws are the way to do that.

Like a really good friend of mine here in Seattle is a high school teacher at a public school. And like, he spends a huge amount of his class time trying to keep kids off of their phones. And so something like a locker at the entrance of the school and everybody puts their phone in it and locks it up for the day. and then they get it back at 3.15 p.m. I honestly think that would be great. I don't think that's like a legal thing. Like, I don't think the state of Washington needs to pass a law to do that. A lot of schools kind of already do this and already have policies.

And things like no phones before high school and stuff. Again, I think that's a fairly good, like, rule of thumb, although, of course, it depends on a specific kid. And the – it would be really weird to regulate it. It would be really, like, to make that the law is very strange. I think parents know their kids. And also, I think like all of his other work, it seems to assume that there aren't already a ton of anxieties about this. And parents are really cautious about this. I mean, everyone I know who's a parent, they're all saying, like, I'm really nervous with my kid having a phone.

And, like, we didn't have this when we were kids. This is a totally uncharted territory for me. And so in general, I don't really see people getting their kids phones too young. Or maybe they're getting them those phones. You know, you can only, like, dial three numbers. Like, you can dial your parents to, like, come and pick you up, like, for safety reasons. But you can't, like, actually use any interface. It's like, I don't know.

me, it just feels like leaving this up to the parents, it seems fine. I mean, as a rule of thumb, sure, but I wouldn't need any, like, regulation for that. Look, if my kid can get good enough at using the iPad that he can start making real money on robots, that's fine. That's why get your kid into online poker. Five, six, seven. Exactly. You see those little, those little toddler fingers using an iPad, like a claw? That's incredible. That's incredible technique. I'm having kids so I can teach him to be a Twitch streamer. It's the only reason to do it.

That's the way to do. Money bags, maybe. Nothing has ever gone wrong turning your children into influencers. What we did find that was interesting about this sort of idea of just like ripping the phones and screens away. So Andrew Shabelsky and psychologist Christopher Ferguson talked to platformer, Casey Newton's newsletter about this. And they said, not only is this not supported by evidence, but it could backfire. Nothing magic happens to you when you turn 14 and get your first phone. as a parent, you still have to have these tough conversations with your kids about responsible usage.

And honestly, it's easier to get a 10-year-old to do something than a 14-year-old. It's almost kind of like the debate around like when children should drink like European versus U.S. rules. And it's like, do you want them to learn how to like fit this into their lives more seamlessly or do you want it to be like a big moment? Yeah. And I sort of get it. I get the argument actually. Yeah. And also they're living in a digital world.

So kind of like sex ed. It's like you can put your head in the sand or you can tell. than that like this is the world you live in and you should probably be relatively literate with it. Well, the interesting thing about these, these prescriptions too, is that it's, he's kind of acting as if they're aimed at the kids, but they're really aimed at the parents.

And when you have these policies of like keeping kids away from phones, it's the opposition is from the parents, right? And so it's his own generation that has this, like I think one thing that he is right about and he mentions this in calling of the American mind too is that, you know, free roaming kids is like kind of a thing of the past. right? Like we used to have like roughly half of kids walked her bike to school and now it's like 10%. And a lot of that is like the dominance of cars, the lack of safety in cities, right? But that's all shit that adults did. And he's kind of putting the blame for that on kids. But the recommendation is really just like redesigning cities so that kids can like safely walk everywhere. It really has nothing to do with like whether or not the kids themselves are like somehow a problem and like wrenching their phones away. It's like give them stuff to do and like let them do it so that they don't get like pulled over by the cops for like being around on their bikes, you know, age 15 or something.

And so a lot of it is the failures of his own generation that he's projecting onto kids as like, oh, we've damaged the kids. Well, you can't do walkable cities because that's that's totalitarian. But what you could do is like replace your child's phone with a Ford F1F1. You just let them go cruising. Just let them cruise. Those things are huge. They're not going to get hurt. They can do whatever they want with them.

And soon all the kids will have Applevision pros so they won't have to leave the house at all. Which we're wandering around the metaverse from home. That's really how you fix this, I think, is strap a headset to these kids. Yeah, we should have done this in the 80s and just no teens play Nintendo or watch TV. I mean, when you look back at the previous moral panic, it's not really a solution to any of these things. One of Heights's ideas is like, just teens don't use phones. And like if enough teens don't use phones, like everyone will be fine and everything will be happy. Like, that doesn't seem very realistic to me.

Just don't do it. Have you tried not doing the bad thing? Have you just tried not doing that thing? Maybe if you only did good things. Yeah. Kids should be outside away from their phones attending a Miliginopolis. That's where teens should be. Hearing slurs in the distance. Oh, yeah. I'm becoming a better person. I'm becoming more well-rounded all the time. Exactly.

So have you seen the fantastic clips of Josh Howley bullying Mark Zuckerberg? Oh, no. That sounds delightful, though. It is delightful. But as you're about to hear, it has also just turned into a bunch of political theater that doesn't really matter like this next clip here's a quote from your own study quote we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls here's another quote teens blamed Instagram this is your study for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression this reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups that's your study senator we try to under understand the the feedback and

how people feel about the services we can improve your own dad of your own The own study says that you make life worse for one in three teenage girls. You increase anxiety and depression. That's what it says. And you're here testifying to us in public that there's no link. You've been doing this for years. Injected into my veins. I, you know, I hate Josh Holly, but that's good stuff right there.

That's good political theater. This is the strongest let them fight energy I've ever received from a screen. This is rewiring my brain. Yeah, it's awesome. Let's listen to a bit more. Those are facts, Mr. Zuckerberg. That's not a question. That's the large fact.

Let me show you some more facts. Here are some information from a whistleblower who came before the Senate testified under oath in public. He worked for you, the senior executive. Here's what he showed he found when he studied your products. So for example, this is girls between the ages of 13 and 15 years old. 37% of them reported that they had been exposed to nudity on the platform unwanted in the last seven days. 24% said that they had experienced unwanted sexual advances they've been propositioned in the last seven days. 17% said they had encountered self-harm content pushed at them in the last seven days.

My question is, who did you fire for this? Yo! All right. I mean, I hate that I sort of like, I'm sort of with Holly on this. Like, these are disturbing numbers. And like, yeah, it does seem like a fucking viper's nest in Instagram for, for like 14 year old girls. What's frustrating, though, as as gratifying as this clip is,

and I have one more clip to show you after this, is that they're not really talking about anything of substance here. They're just sort of like, they're just duking it out. Yeah, Republicans don't give a shit about the health and well-being of teenage girls. Guys, do not hand over the safeguarding of teenage girls to Republicans. There's no way. I mean, they're doing political theater. They're trying to get clips for Twitter.

As long as they can marry them, I guess. Yeah, exactly. care about that context. I want them married and working in the minds by the time they're 14. Exactly. Yeah. I wish that this stuff went anywhere. And we're about to see kind of exactly how feudal this starts to feel. So if you can skip ahead, we got one last segment here. Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. There's families of victims here today. Have you apologized to the victims? Would you like to do so now? Well, they're here. You're on national television. Would you like now to apologize to the victims who have been harmed?

about your product. Show them the pictures. Make them turn around. Would you like to apologize for what you've done to these good people? Oh my God. It's so good.

Look at him and try to be a little human. He's glitching out. Okay. So who were the victims he was apologizing to, by the way? Like families of girls who had been like hurt by Instagram and somewhere.

It's such a weird political theater this like parading of victims. Is he doing this? Obviously like I mean I've had nightmares that are less horrifying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, dude. This entire change. Put him in his underwear and this is a literal nightmare that I've had. And like as gratifying as this stuff is and as good political theater as it is,

the problem is that like it doesn't really go anywhere. Yeah. And it's the same thing with Heights book. It's the same thing with all of these complaints throughout history, which is that like, we're sort of just larping. We're sort of just like sleep walking through these things where we're not really trying to interrogate what's causing them.

We're not trying to figure out real solutions. And it's, I don't know, I find it very frustrating and kind of, and kind of like radicalizing that we don't care enough to change this stuff. Yeah. And also the, I think also the reliance on like trying to prevent the exposure to this stuff rather than teaching resilience. Like if you read the actual studies on the effects of. of social media use.

A lot of it finds, it does actually find increased depression, but it also finds increases in like social support and increases in self-esteem. And like, oftentimes it actually finds good mental health effects and bad mental health effects at the same time. No, no. This is exactly the thing, which is like we're not talking about how the internet can be like a real savior to lonely kids,

particularly kids who are queer, kids who are from different minority groups. I mean, like, I know the internet has been a massive lifeline for me. I don't know about in your own. That's how I was recruited to homosexuality. It was through the internet. Oh, they got you. They got you.

That's what happens. China came for you. China was like, let's make this guy gay. Okay. Here's Grindr. It's been installed on your phone. No, but you mentioned this at the top of the episode,

which is that we both grew up around the same time with the same kind of technology. Sort of during what I think is kind of the most interesting period here where, like, we're coming online. The whole world is coming online. And I remember. like being in like blog communities and uh AIM chat rooms and like I'll admit this like I met a girl at a green date concert in 2006 and we had an AIM exclusive relationship long distance for several years. Really?

Like sending each other music and like flirting and like yeah. That's adorable. How long did it or like how did it how did it end eventually? We I went to visit her her freshman year and it was awkward. And, like, and you didn't end on bad terms, but, like, you know, it was this thing where I think for the two of us, trading music back and forth and having this private conversations away from our families was really important. Yeah, yeah. That's how she radicalized me into joining ISIS. I mean, no, but.

She's in a new beheading videos and Green Day. Exactly, yeah. I moved to Syria and the rest was history. But I, no, I, yeah, I mean, I mean, what were your own experiences like on the Internet back then, like as a teenager? Dude. trading porn picks with AOL chat rooms. That was a very formative experience. How long were those upload speeds?

I have to know how long that time. It was like one line at a time, like in little chunks. You're like, ooh. Here it comes. Here comes the hair. Here comes the hair. I got some shoulders. They're shoulders.

Yeah. I was like, God, I was probably 13 or something. And like, they weren't even porn. They were like, photo. of like men in their underwear. That was like, that was like, as risque as like I could imagine at age 13. But then that this to me is like the whole thing is that if you only look for the harms of social media and screen time, et cetera, then like you will find them.

But if you look for both the benefits and the harms, you find a much more complicated picture. And like, I think when we look back at technologies, that's what we find with everything, right? The automobile created huge harms but also huge benefits. And like any of these moral panics just end up. having like complicated effects on society. And I think that's probably what we're going to find. And yeah, like you said, if you try to isolate kids and, you know, try to ensure that they will never see porn ever, right?

They're not going to be ready for it. Whereas if you just assume that they have seen porn and give them information to contextualize it, right? Or the other messages are like, I don't know, the kinds of interactions and the kind of material that they're going to see online, preventing them from seeing it is probably not going to work. But if you as a parent can like, you know, get them ready. for it and try to help them understand the world that they're living in. That seems like a much more sustainable solution than just, oh, yeah, Timmy's never going to see porn or learn about sex online.

Right. And we also sort of, through all of this, you know, we've been comparing these to moral panics of the past, the beeper, grand theft auto, you know, all this stuff, TV. But the mistake that we always make when we talk about the internet, and especially when like these books come out about the harms of the internet. is that we treat the internet like one thing. When it's actually like a bundle of very, like, we're not talking about Facebook.

We're not talking about TikTok. We're talking about phones. Yeah. The things you can do with your smartphone are so varied that like there is no point calling it one thing. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. And that's also if you think about it.

It's so obvious when you think about your own internet use that I do stuff with my phone that is like really bad for me and makes me feel sick to my stomach. And then I also do stuff with my phones like keep track of my friends, check in on people I haven't seen in a while. Say hi to people. like give somebody a call when I'm bored at the bus stop. How are you? I mean, a lot of the stuff I'm doing is like totally pro-social and really important for alleviating things like loneliness and for, you know, getting support when you're going through something

difficult. And so if you look at your own use, it's like, is everything I'm doing on there, like very intellectually nutritious? Of course not. But it's the same with teenagers. They're doing dumb shit on there and they're doing good shit on there. And they're bullying each other and they're learning stuff. And this is just kind of the story of technology throughout time, despite the fact that the

middle-aged people are constantly doing, like basically exactly. the same whining no matter what the actual technology is. I really think the biggest thing is just like understanding the way that teens actually use their smartphones, not necessarily looking for the harms, which I think a lot of the research is built around, but actually like qualitative research on kids. In what way are you using your phone? I feel like most of these moral panics kind of skip the step where they do the basic information gathering of like what are kids actually doing on their phones.

What are they doing on the internet? I think that's the thing that has to be the number one, like the starting point. Because there's probably harms that we're not even thinking of and there's probably benefits that we're not even thinking of. But it's weird how much in the literature that stuff just doesn't come up. It's all this alleged quantitative analysis, but most of it's based on bad data anyway. I, for one, am shocked that a nuanced and measured approach to this sort of thing isn't more popular on bookshel. Yeah, it's incredible. We're not having an adult conversation about something for the first time in America. I'm surprised Joe Rogan would platform for the person.

From the country that brought you rainbow parties. I can't believe we're having a slightly one-dimensional conversation about youths. God, I forgot about rainbow parties. I was so busy space monkeying at the time that I never went to any rainbow parties. So I was I was huffing Jankham down by the

reservoir. These are all just upcoming episode ideas by the way. I was bleeding from the cuts from those slap bracelets. Just like I was lightheaded from the lack of blood in my arms from those. Oh man. Did you ever know a kid like in high school who tried to like smoke banana peels? Did you know? I was that kid.

I just smoked oregano once. You spoke to oregano? Literal oregano. Because we couldn't get weed and we were like, okay, what else is there? This is also green. It tastes like, shit. What's green? See, that's why kids need phones.

Because we could Google, should I smoke oregano? If we had all been watching pornography, we wouldn't have had that problem. We would have had something to do that after that. Some guy in Reddit would be like, hey, don't smoke oregano. What you want to go do is buy DMT 57 off Amazon and it'll... We would have making explosives or something. Yeah. Make a pipe bomb.

Michael, I want to thank you for coming on. Truly, this was such a blast. This was awesome. I'm big. So right now you've got maintenance phase and you've got if books could kill. Two incredible podcasts. Where else can people find you on the internet right now? Those two places, if books could kill and maintenance phase, which are on your telephone, on your brain rewiring device, wherever you listen to them.

Are you on any of the apps, you know, truth social, gags? God, Parlor. Any of the good Twitter replacements? You can find me, I mean, I don't know when this is going to air, but as of now, I'm on blue sky and still reluctantly and kind of indefensibly on Twitter. But we'll see how I am when this comes out. Yeah. Well, thank you very much.

And this was a blast. And yeah, I'll definitely text you over and over again obsessively as my phone breaks my brain. Yeah, please do. Panic World is a Garbage Day production. You can subscribe to the newsletter at Garbage Day. email. Banic World is written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by me, Ryan Broderick, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis, video editing by Kat Rasek, and our incredibly derange logo was drawn by Gabby Cash. If you want to give us $5 a month, you can do that at

patreon.com slash panic world, and in return, we'll give you more content to consume. If you want to buy an ad on the show or sponsor it in any way, you can contact the fine folks at multitude at multitude. production slash ads. And if you want to get involved, in any other way. You know, any other crazy scheme you want to rope us into, you can contact our Fixer and Bagman, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at Panicworldpod at gmail.com. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.