SOLVED with Mark Manson - Is Social Media Really Ruining Our Lives… Or Is It Something Else? (ft. Jonathan Haidt)

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Is everything going to hell in a handcart because of smartphones and social media? In this episode, I sit down with NYU professor and bestselling author Jonathan Haidt to tackle this burning question. Dr. Haidt makes a compelling case that our addiction to these devices is wreaking havoc on society, from mental health crises to political turmoil. But is it really all the smartphone’s fault? I'm not so sure it's quite that simple, so I wanted to dive deeper into the nuances. We get into the nitty-gritty and I challenge some of Haidt’s claims, exploring questions like, why do these issues seem to hit the English-speaking world the hardest? Is this another moral panic, or is this time really different? We also discuss the differences in how smartphones affect various demographics and cultures, and why understanding these distinctions is crucial. Plus, we explore Jonathan’s practical and highly sensible recommendations for parents, educators, and policymakers. Whether you’re a skeptic or a die-hard believer, this episode will make you rethink your relationship with the technology in our pockets. Let's do this. Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off your @MUDWTR by going to ⁠mudwtr.com/IDGAF⁠ #mudwtrpod Get 10% off your first month of therapy at BetterHelp.com/IDGAF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose.com. It is the question of our time. Is it all the smartphones's fault? It's the question that everybody seems to be asking, whether it's the mental health crisis, the political crises, or just seemingly everything in the world going to shit at the same time.

Is it the smartphone's fault? Is everything being driven by our obsession and addiction to the development? devices in our pockets. NYU professor and best-selling author Jonathan Haidt argues, yes, it is the smartphone's fault. He believes there's a direct correlation between smartphones, social media news feeds, front-facing cameras, and pretty much everything going wrong in society at the same time. His new book is chock-full of data and charts supporting this claim, and he particularly focuses

on the mental health crisis among young people. Now, my personal belief is, I think it's complicated. I don't think it's as simple as smartphones equal bad. Smartphones ruin kids. As somebody who's very familiar with the data on this subject, this story is very complex and there's a lot of nuance to it. So in today's episode, I challenged Dr. Hyde on some of his claims and we get into the nitty gritty of the issue.

We look at the research and we ask ourselves, why doesn't some of this make sense? Now, he's been on pretty much every podcast under the sun this year talking about this subject, so I really wanted to try to take this conversation in a different direction. Some of the things that we cover include, if it is the phone's fault, why aren't we seeing mental health crises in every other part of the world? Why does this seem to be limited to the English-speaking world?

Also, is this just another moral panic? I mean, I remember when I was a kid, people were freaking out about cable TV and violent video games and the corruption of the morality of our youth and how we're all going to be drug addicts shooting each other on the streets. It never happened. So if this is different, what makes it? it different this time. We also talk about what the difference is between psychological development and educational development and why the difference between those two things actually really matters. Because I personally think one of the most important distinctions around this

subject is separating the psychological issues from the educational issues. And I think there's much stronger evidence that there are a lot of educational issues with technology much more so than there are psychological issues. We also talk about why smartphones affect boys and girls differently, why they affect liberals and conservatives differently? Why they affect religious people and non-religious people differently? Why they affect different cultures or people who speak different languages differently? This to me is the most fascinating part of this whole issue, is that if smartphones have such a negative effect on people, why do they affect different backgrounds and belief systems

differently? And finally, if social media is an addiction, is it more like alcohol where there's a a small minority of people who have their lives completely fucked up by it and the vast majority of people are kind of okay? Or is it like cigarettes where it's just bad for everybody all the time? I think this is a really important question and it's an important distinction as we try to figure out as a society what our relationship is going to be with this technology. Now while I don't buy wholesale into all Dr. Heights's arguments and explanations for what's going

on, I really do agree with his prescriptions. I think he comes up with four really distinct really important and practical recommendations for parents, policymakers, teachers, and educators. And all four of these strike me is really reasonable and important. So we're going to get into all four of those prescriptions towards the end of the episode, and I hope you'll stick around to listen to those. And finally, just as a quick reminder, if you're watching this on YouTube, we are moving the podcast over to its own channel soon.

So be sure to head over to that channel and subscribe. Otherwise, you're going to miss fucking great episodes like this one pretty soon. Without further ado, here is my conversation with Jonathan Haidt. 20 million books sold. Zero Fox Given. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. Dr. Height, it's great to have you here. It's great to see you again.

Good to see you, Mark. The book is The Anxious Generation. It is number one everywhere. You really hit the bullseye on the zeitgeist at the moment. timing right that's for sure yeah you definitely did um the book's fantastic i think it's it's super important this might be the book in the last year the most random people in my life have brought it up to me let me guess all parents all parents every parent and educators yeah yeah um psychologists and psychiatrists yes so it is definitely making an impact it's the sort of topic that i think people

have very strong intuitions about and as a social You know that our intuitions are often very wrong. I made my living. Proving. Yes. So I'm actually going to, I'm going to play a little bit of devil's advocate on this episode, mainly just because I think the research that's going on on this topic is super interesting, and it is such an important topic.

I mean, technology, it affects all of our lives. So I'd like to try to find a little bit, a little bit of clarity or really just like break into the nuance of what's going on. what's going on. So, but why don't we just start with what, what is the quick summary of the argument of the book? The quick summary is that something went terribly wrong in the early 2010s. And young people who were born in 1996 and later were really, really different from those who were born a few years earlier. And that's what gave rise to my previous book, the coddling the American mind with Greg Wukhianoff. It was all about how, oh, we overprotected our kids, we didn't give them enough play. And we speculated in that book, and, you know, maybe smartphones

on social media, you know, the timing is right, but you know, who knows? And we wrote that in 2017. Well, since then, I've been collecting everything I can find on teen mental health, on the research on whether it's social media and the phones. And when you put it all together, the story of the book is not, oh, it's social media is destroying girls. I mean, there is a clear link there. The story is we had what I call the great rewiring of childhood between 2010 and 2015.

If you went through puberty before 2010, so what were you born? 84. Okay, so you're an older millennial. Yes. So you grew up with the internet, but not when you were a little kid, but you had the internet when you were a teenager. Yeah, it was like 11 or 12 years old. And it was great, right?

Yeah. The early internet was amazing. Right. And so we thought, oh, you know, the technology is great. And you got your first smartphone when you were in your 20s, probably. Wow, 26 maybe, 25, 26, yeah. So your brain was basically fully cooked when you were drawn into the, the craziness, the cesspool of life on social media all the time.

Yeah, right. But imagine that you weren't 26. Imagine we're 10. Yeah. And now you're not going up playing with other kids. You're seeing, you know, this, I mean, it's incredible what happened to childhood between 2010 and 2015. It begins earlier.

Yes. We begin cutting down on childhood play in the 90s. But so the argument of the book is that we have overprotected our children in the real world. We began that in the 90s and then we, you know, we just do not let kids out now. We think they'll be abducted, or they'll fall down, or they'll get hit by a car. And we've underprotected them online because the early internet was so amazing, the smartphone was so amazing.

And once our kids were doing this all day long, we thought, well, maybe it's stimulating their brains or something. So we didn't really notice what was happening between 2010 and 2015, but now we see it. And while the evidence is, there are many specific experiments that are debatable, and I'm in those debates. But as we just saw in the Surgeon General's call last week for warning labels, I will make the case to you in your audience that I think the evidence is actually quite solid that this phone-based childhood is really incompatible with flourishing, with human flourishing and development,

and that it is harming kids at a level, a scale beyond anything you can imagine because it's not just the U.S. It's most of the developed world. Yeah. So how is this non-emoral panic? Like when I was a kid, it was the video games were going to rot our brain. When you were a kid, the television was going to rot your brain, comic books. Like, why is it different this time? Okay, good question.

That's the one that I, that's really the, that's what animates the, you know, my critics and the skeptics. And, you know, as with the boy who cried wolf, if, you know, you cry wolf once and it turns out not to be. And you cry wolf a second time and it turns out not to be. So I can understand why people say, isn't this just like every other one? But there's a several part answer to it. So the first is that it's never happened before that a product came out and a generation collapsed. So what we're seeing now is, I mean, we haven't seen. It's not like when television came out, suddenly the baby boomers all got depressed or violent or anything else.

There wasn't this radical change within a few years. That's the first thing. The second is that in a traditional moral panic, nothing really happens in the real world, But a story goes around about a kid who played violent video games and then shot up his school or chopped his parents' heads off or something like that. And maybe it happened once, maybe it happened zero times. But it's media induced and then it gets spread around. This time is not like that.

This time, everyone, I have everyone, most people have seen, most people, I mean, this is the main thing that parents talk about, or one of the main things parents talk about. It's one of the main things teens talk about. So everyone has seen it within their own social circles. This is not some distant story. That's the second. The third is that in a traditional moral panic, the kids playing video games aren't saying,

please video game companies, please make video games that are not so much fun that I can't stop. Please help us. Stop addicting us. The kids love the games, and it's the parents who are freaking out. So that's the third difference. This time around, there are now dozens of organizations

started by Gen Z who are pushing back. We're saying, wait a second, look what you're doing to us. Stop it. And then a fourth one, which I'm just beginning to first. formulate is that for these previous moral panics where everyone assumes there was no harm, we were actually, we operated in the social sciences, we operationalize a question that is, you know, is our video games harming kids. And the way we do it is we say, well, let's look at

those first person shooter. Let's look at violent video games. Are violent video games making kids violent? And I looked into this research to write the book and the answer is no, violent video games don't make people behave violent. There is some debate, maybe there's a small effect, but it probably is not what caused increases in violence. But does that mean the video games are fine? And when you talk to the thousands and thousands of parents whose boys were lost to video games, who wouldn't go outside, who didn't make friends

and who spent their entire adolescents on video games, yeah, those boys were harmed. And we did some research for the book on addiction. There's a debate whether you should use the word addiction. The general word is called problematic use. but it sure looks like addiction. It's compulsive use that interferes with other domains of life. It's hard to stop.

And when you are stopped, you have the symptoms of withdrawal, including irritability, anxiety, insomnia, and dysphoria. And typically, it's about 5 to 10 percent. So if 5 to 10 percent of boys were getting addicted to video games, now it would be higher now because the video games are amazing. Whereas when I was a kid, you couldn't really get addicted to Pong, or space invaders or whatever. Maybe you could, but it wouldn't be the same.

The question, are violent video games making kids violent? No, that was just a moral panic. But it doesn't follow that video games are okay because actually it did damage a lot of kids. The question on television is even more interesting. Did television make kids violent? Did television make kids X, Y, or Z? Couldn't you argue that all the unrest in the 60s and the free love and the drug and drugs experimentation and Vietnam and everything?

Couldn't you argue that that was television driven? Well, remember, television was not made by kids. made by teenagers. It was made by people in their parents and grandparents' generation. And sure, ideas spread on television more quickly. So the extent that things are more viral, so yes, sure, you know, Woodstock footage from Woodstock would be shown somewhere else. But I guess the main thing was, is television rotting kids' brains. That's what people thought. It's going to warp them. They're going to come out all weird and terrible. And it looks like that's overall not true. It didn't, you know, I mean, we watched a lot of stupid TV and

I think we came out okay most of us. But what I'm realizing is we always ask a single question when actually there are multiple pathways, there can be multiple pathways of harm going on. What I'm really coming to appreciate about television, I've been reading Neil Postman in particular. Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan, these are the great media theories. Because what they saw was that electronic communication beginning with the telegraph, change the planet, It changes everything. It's changing a major parameter of how news moves around.

And it only came together for me when I was reading Neil Postman about the transformation of television. And of course, Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. Don't focus on what they're watching on TV. Focus on the fact that we're all now sitting around the hearth, which is the TV. We're not out on our porch. We're not talking to our neighbors. We're sitting in our air conditioned living room watching.

That's what life is now. Now does that rot their brains? Not necessarily. But did it rot social capital? devastated it. So in fact, you know, America's in huge trouble. Our democracy is coming apart. And actually, I would say that a large, some part of the blame is due to television because television, and this is straight from Robert Putnam. He says the biggest factor in the loss of social capital was the loss of the greatest generation. The World War II generation, World War II

was huge. But the second biggest factor, according to his analyses, was television. And so if television played a leading role in the decline of trust, local trust, and that's setting us up for a lot of the political chaos and the real risk of ungovernability that we have in this country, that I would say those who said television was a moral panic are actually wrong. The specific question, is television going to rot my child's brain? The answer appears to be no. But is television okay? Is television a positive good for society? That's a very different question. And in the long run, the answer might be no, it was not good for society. Especially in the 80s when cable television came out, right?

Like, and you started, maybe TV wasn't the moral panic, but it started disseminating moral panics, right? You had the satanic, child abuse panic. There were a number of things throughout the 80s because as a culture, we hadn't developed the antibodies to understand what was just bullshit, right? And there's a lot of very interesting intelligent writing in the late 80s, early 90s. Postman was writing around then. I'm a huge fan of David Foster Wallace. I don't know if you've ever... No, people say, yeah, I need to read him.

So the basis of his most famous novel, Infinite Jest, which I so wish he was alive today, just to know what he would say about TikTok. Because the basis of Infinite Just, the whole premise of the novel, is that there's a movie that's so entertaining that people stop eating, they stop sleeping. Oh, my God. They just keep watching. movie on repeat like what would happen in the world if like such a movie exists and in the in the in the book it becomes a an instrument of of of like mailing it to people without telling them what

it is to you know and it's it's absolutely fascinating and and i sometimes wonder you know sometimes i feel like tic-tok is the infinite jest like it's it's we've actually he was right he was just 20 years early yeah and um but yeah there's there's so much interesting media criticism from back then. That's right. I'm unable to read books because I always do something else. I'm off doing something else. But I can do audiobooks because that just keeps going and you listen.

And so I'm about halfway through Brave New World, which we read in high school and I remember in high school, I thought, well, this doesn't sound so bad. Everyone's getting sex. Like I just couldn't get past the free sex. Drugs and sex. This is great. This is great. What's so bad about this?

You know, but the question is, are we more, is our world, did our world become Orwell's 1984, or did it become Huxley's Brave New World? The answer is it became Brave New World. Right. And social media, including TikTok, is like that. It has a narcotic effect, it's kind of a dulling effect. It's like a slot machine. It's, you know, afterwards, people don't feel it was a good use of their time.

Some of my students are on TikTok four, five, six hours a day. And they see that it's bad for them, but it's just hard to stop. It's hard to get off of the habit. Between this book and Codeling of the American Mind, you kind of hit on these three points. that have changed over the last 10 to 20 years, let's say. And you already touched on all three of them. So lack of community. Yeah, yes.

Lack of play over protection in the real world. And then the social media piece. I'm wondering if, and this is pure conjecture, purely your opinion. If you were to make a pie chart of what percentage is being driven by each of those three things, what would you say? Well, I'll start by resisting the pie chart and here's why. So in the book, the story we're telling the book, is a tragedy in two acts, the loss of the play-based childhood, and then the rise of the phone-based

childhood. And I don't know if you got the community piece. There are hints of it in the book, or if you've heard me talk recently. But I now see it as a tragedy in three acts. This is something, this is work I've done with Zach Rosh, my research partner and all of this. Why did we take childhood away? Why did we suddenly think that our neighbors were going to sexually molest our kids in the 90s? And it turns out that the backstory of that is the loss of community and trust all the stuff that Robert Putnam wrote about in the book Bowling alone. And the World War II generation begins to die off, and they were very trusting and very good citizens.

Television brings us all indoors into our own home, cuts us off from our neighbors. So it's not exactly a pie chart. It's more like a tragedy in three acts. If we didn't lose community, then we would not have locked up our kids. We would not have said, I can't ever let you out because I can't trust the adults near me.

And Scan Navy they didn't lock up their kids. And Scan the Navy, they still have high trust. the kids walk around. So the loss of community, I'm not going to give it a pie chart. I'm going to say this is a mega social problem, which could do us in. You can't have a large, diverse, free society when you don't trust each other at a institution. So this is a gigantic problem, which had one of its unfortunate side effects is it drove the loss of the play-based childhood. Now then, the loss of the play-based childhood, as long as kids are now all indoors, we're not letting them out,

But oh, just in the nick of time, the internet comes in. And so our kids, especially the boys, are perfectly happy to sit there all day on a computer. And those early boys who did that were fine. A lot of them went on to found computer companies and tech companies. So again, we thought, oh, this stuff is great. And it's only then the rise of the phone-based childhood is really only once you get between 2010 and 2015 smartphones, front-facing camera, Instagram, high-speed internet. In 2010, you couldn't spend all day long on your flip phone.

But in 2015, lots of kids are spending all day long on this smartphone. So that's my way of saying it's more sequential. Okay. But I'll tell you what, I will answer your question more directly. Sure. Because there are cases like Scandinavia where they still, they didn't go through that act one of the tragedy. They still have high trust.

They didn't go through losing the play-based childhood. They still let their seven-year-olds out to run around and play. And yet, their kids are having rising depression, anxieties, and well, self-harmine suicide are more complicated. But they definitely are having rising bad mental health. And in all these countries, it's always the girls going up more than the boys, at least in absolute terms. So I would say that the essential piece to this global collapse is the phone-based childhood. And it's not just social media. Because for the boys, it's not so much Instagram.

For the boys, it's video games and porn is what they're mostly doing. So how's that? That's good. That makes sense to me. And I feel like we're actually going to kind of end up there. The Volkswagen Atlas is a 7-seat powerhouse that actually makes sense for real life. It's got cargo space for all your gear, the dogs, and even half of your rec league soccer team. And under the hood, a 2-liter turbocharged TSI engine that hauls up to 5,000 pounds.

The 7-seat Atlas, you deserve more space. Visit bw.ca to learn more. S-UBW, German engineered for all. Can you explain briefly the psychological importance, the developmental importance of play? Why does play matter so much to kids? You know, the brain, you know what? I'll start at the beginning here. When the human genome project was completed, it was a surprise that we had only about 20,000 genes, not very many.

And, you know, the idea that the genes make the brain, well, it turns out, no, this is not enough information in the genes. The genes just sort of get the ball rolling. The nerves begin developing. They sort of grow based on local factors. They connect. Some connections die off. All that's happening in utero in the first few years of life. And that's a lot of growth.

But then the brain reaches almost full size around age five or six. And from then on in, it's all fine-tuning. Now, how does the brain know where to grow? The answer is in feedback from the environment. And so humans like all mammals, we have these big brains, especially the social mammals like dogs and chimpanzees, with these big brains. And the way we wire them up is with play. So all mammals play.

This giant cultural brain that we have that no other animal has, it's expecting the right kind of interaction with the environment at the right time. And so you have to learn to crawl before you can walk. and kids are interested in climbing and they do all these things, all of it is in feedback with brain development. And then it moves on to social development. So imagine this incredibly intricate dance where the environment is absolutely necessary.

You have to have a lot of stuff coming in. And you take a giant cleaver, you cut right through, you say, how about none of that anymore? Here, here's a screen. Everything's going to happen here. It's like, it just screeches to a halt. And this is why we find such a sharp division.

There's never been this sharper division. I mean, actually, the baby boomers, 1946. Okay, that was also a pretty sharp division, the post-war world. But the birth year around 1996 plus or minus, that's a really sharp division. Because the generation that went through puberty, puberty is a real acceleration of this neural dance. The neurons are really rewiring from the back to the front of the brain. So in the book, I really focus on puberty and all your listeners, all the viewers, especially those who are parents. I really want you to focus on puberty.

All of childhood is important, but millennials are okay because. they made it through puberty before they got smartphones and social media. Gen Z is not okay because they went through puberty on smartphones and social media. I have to ask, how much of this is the overbearance of the educational system? Like when I think of most parents my age, I mean, we're recording this in New York City. I used to live in New York City. I remember having friends in New York City who were applying the daycares based on which daycares could help their kids get into an Ivy League school, right?

So it's a lot of parents these days, they're thinking about what's my kid's college application going to look like, and the kid is like four. Like how much of this is mistaking educational development for psychological development? Yeah. So we can go through a whole catalog of things that are bad in some way for development. But the fact that when you look at the graphs of especially anxiety, depression, and self-harm, those three really go together. You look at the graphs of those, everything was fine from the 90s all the way through 2010,

2011. There's really no sign of a change. Now, all during this period, you know, America's getting much more intense about college. You know, when I applied to colleges in 1981 when I graduated from high school, it was competitive, but not crazy. And by the 90s, it was crazy. So the real, and this is sort of, you know, the neoliberal revolution, the Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, everything's about competition.

So the economy society really changes a lot in the 80s and 90s, but we don't see a rise of mental illness. And also that would just be in the Anglo countries. Whereas the increase, because it's not exactly, I mean, the increase in mental illness is not exactly global. The developing world, life is getting better there overall. They're getting richer. They're coming out of poverty, so their happiness is not dropping. Although young people's happiness is rising very slowly compared to older people. So this is actually a new finding from Danny Blancheflower, just in the last month or two.

all over the world, it used to be the case that the happiest people were young people and old people and middle-aged people are in the middle. It's called the U-shaped curve of happiness. That was true until about 2015. It is gone from this planet. So even in the developing world where everyone's getting happier on average, young people are not really moving and everyone else is. So young people are now the least happy people in their country in the great majority of countries

on this planet. That was a side, sorry, that was a little sigh, an interesting aside I hope, from the question. Oh, your question, I'm sorry, Kristen ultimately was about like super competitive parenting. She's education and just people mistaken, educate, yeah. Yeah, all that stuff is bad. But if you, but if it was really the rising pressure, then we'd see it more like in the coastal, you know, we'd see it more in like Berkeley and New York, but it's everywhere. The demographic differences are small other than gender.

Gender is huge. The other two that actually really matter, and this I think is a really important clue to what's going on, is religion and politics. So what race you are, isn't that important? Oh, LGBTQ, their levels are higher and their increases are bigger. Whether you are in a religious family, if so, you're more protected. You didn't go up as much. You're not as bad off.

And if you're in a conservative family compared to liberal. So that tells us about the anchoring, the sort of anchoring in community. Yeah. I want to talk about both of those. Why don't we start with gender? Why is it so much worse for girls? In the book and in my previous interviews, I've been saying that social media is worse for girls. Social media is worse for girls.

I'm sorry, that's very, very clear. Overall, if we look at, but here's my new story, a little slight change. If we check in on kids when they're 14, 15, we're going to see the girls are doing worse than the boys. They have much higher rates of anxiety and depression. It is now normal. If you're an American girl or British or Canadian or Australian, it's normal that you're thinking about suicide. The latest numbers, federal surveys, I think it was 35% of American girls have thought seriously about suicide in the last year. 24% of them have made a suicide plan.

And that is way up from 2010 when the numbers were a little more than half of that. So girls are doing really badly. And the boys, they're on video games and porn. They're having fun. They're lonely. They're not doing well, but they're not miserable and depressed. I mean, some are. But checking at 14, 15, you're going to see the boys are doing worse.

Check in on them at 30. The oldest members of Gen Z are now 28. Checking on now at 28, what do you see? The girls have largely completed college. Every college in America practically is now 55 to 60% female. Boys are dropping out of life. They're not trying in school. School is really made for girls.

It gets more and more feminine. What you do in school appeals to girls much more than boys. Boys are much more sucked in. I mean, the video games just get more and more amazing. And so boys are getting pulled out of the world. they're less likely to graduate high school, less likely to graduate college, more likely to be arrested, of course, more likely to drop out for a lot of reasons. Therefore, they're less employable. So when we look at 28-year-olds, we do see, Pew has data on this, many more of the boys

are living with their parents and have basically no future. So now who's happier? I don't actually know the answer to that question. But my point is, the girls are more anxious and depressed, but at least they're employed. The boys are dropping out of life. So for the rest of their lives, I think the boys are actually going to do worse. I think the phone-based childhood actually destroys boys' development more, I should say, it doesn't destroy everybody, but it's more of an obstacle to boys' development than it is even to girls. How is it affecting each side of the political spectrum differently?

So Gene Twangy was the first to really point this out. She began pointing out in her book, IGen, 2017, but she really goes into it in a more recent book generations. And several different groups have found this, is that there's long been a couple of differences in positive psychology. So I wrote, my first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis. I used to be very involved in positive psychology. I still learned to some extent.

And there are a couple of big effects in the happiness research literature. Marriage and religion are the two huge ones. Married people are happy than unmarried people, and much of that is causal. There's a reverse correlation too, but a big part of that is causal. And religious people are happy than non-religious. And it's not so much what you believe. It's how often you go to church, synagogue, how embedded you are. Those have been known for a long time.

When you trace out the kids in those different communities, and I'm sorry, I should also say, it's also been known for a long time, although this was more hotly debated, that liberals are more anxious than conservatives, and conservatives are a little happier than liberals. So that's also been known for a long, that's been a longstanding trend. So you take those gaps and you track them out for boys and girls separately, and you see everything's pretty stable until 2012, roughly. and then everybody goes up. But the kids from religious families go up a little,

the kids from secular families go up a lot, the kids from conservative families go up a little, the kids from liberal families go up a lot. And I believe, we don't know why, but the most obvious explanation for me, given all my previous work, in my book The Righteous Mind, I'm a huge fan of Emil Dirkheim,

the sociologists who talked about how we need constraints. We need limits on our ambition. We need limits to push against, when you don't have any limits, it's not freeing and wonderful. You have anim, you have normlessness. You have a sense of just nothingness. The kids whose feet were planted in a community. They had to go to church on Sunday.

They had to visit their grandmother. They had to say, you know, yes, ma'am and no, sir. You know, there were constraints. Those kids, the wave comes, yeah, they're on social media, but not as much as the secular liberal kids. And they are so tied to adults that they can't get washed out to see. Whereas the secular liberal kids, especially, and especially the girls, they're like all talking with each other so much just with other girls, let's say, other kids like them.

They can basically get like pulled off a planet Earth and thrown out into orbit. Yeah. And coming back to the sequentialism over the pie chart, my intuition just diving into all this research. And by the way, I need to give you credit. You on your blog, you list all the research, both research that supports your conclusions and research that contradicts your conclusion. So it's more people need to do that. So thank you for doing that. My intuition is that there's what you just said, that tethering, that tethering of community, that tethering of strong family relationships, strong friendships, real world relationships,

right? Like my sense is that that is, inoculates people a little bit. Yes, that's a good way to the negative effects of social media. I have a hairbrain theory for you. Okay, I love hairbrain theory. You're going to enjoy this? Occasionally they're right. Yeah, you're going to enjoy this because it is based on, I'm going to

I'm glad you brought up righteous mind because this is based, this is going to be a grand unified theory of John Haight. So in the righteous mind, you present moral foundations theory, which you, there's five moral foundations. I'm probably, I'm going to like give you a butchered Wikipedia version of your own, your own theory. So there's harm care. These are basically people's intuitions of what is moral and immoral. Yeah, it's like moral taste, but it's like your, the human mind is receptive. to five or actually six, but six different classes of situations. Go for it.

Okay. So in there you had harm and care, fairness, reciprocity, respect for authority, loyalty to the end group, and then purity discussed, and I'm forgetting one. Purity or sanctity is one. And then the new one that we've added is, well, it's still under discussion, but liberty, liberty versus oppression. Oh, interesting. And then even more recently when we work with Mohammed Atari, we're finally.

finding that fairness is actually two different things. There's equality which the left favors and there's proportionality which the right favors. Interesting. So it gets more complex, but basically five or six taste buds. So from my recollection from the book, and it's been a while since I read it, you talk about political orientation based on the moral taste buds and how the left tends to lean more heavily into harm versus care issues and fairness reciprocity issues. Whereas the right seems to be more predisposed towards loyalty to the end group. The binding foundation. Loyalty, authority, sanctity.

So here's my hairbrain theory. Okay. Because one of the things that I've been long interested in, especially since my profession relies upon it, is how the structural change of media in general, how all of these algorithms and platforms, even something as simple as, you know, Instagram changing the way it ranks content, that can completely reshape my business model overnight, right? So it's something that I'm always paying very close attention to. And one of the things I think about is what sort of content goes viral, what sort of content is naturally rebroadcast more easily, what sort of content

just never really picks up steam is under broadcast relative to its importance. And when I revisited the moral foundations theory, I realize that things that tend to go viral, breaches around harm and care, you know, things that feel very unjust. Somebody's being, you know, beaten up on the street or there's clear prejudice, racism or prejudice happening against them. And then issues of fairness or reciprocity. You think of, you know, a video of a Karen screaming at somebody in a Walmart or something like that.

I feel like that sort of content is over broadcast. Like that is disproportionate to how often it happens in reality and real life. Whereas when you look at things like, you know, lack of loyalty to an end group or lack of respect for an authority, I can't imagine a TikTok for that, right? Whereas the first two I can imagine TikToks very easily that would have millions and millions of views. But when I think about the other, it's like it's harder for me to immediately envision. So, hairbrain theory is that the content that violates.

left-leaning people's moral norms or expectations is overrepresented on social media. How crazy is that? Oh, no, that's obviously true. So Twitter has changed a lot since Elon Musk took it over. But until he did that, there were all kinds of analyses of the politics of the various platforms. Twitter leaned way, way left from its inception until Musk took it over. And Twitter is probably the dominant platform in terms of shaping our perceptions of what's going on in the world. It's not just Twitter that leans left, it's most of the mainstream media.

Right. So I've been writing about this for a long time. There are natural reasons why people on the left gravitate to cultural institutions, intellectual institutions, but then there are additional problems of prejudice and group think. There are all kinds of, I've been studying this with regard to the academy because of course professors have been, they've leaned left for a long time. Something happened in 21st century. We went from leaning left to being overwhelmingly on the left, very few conservatives.

So your basic observation that what you see, is mostly harm care stuff, stuff that upsets liberals. And in our daily life, there's a study done like they beep people like, you know, like just what comes up in life. And yeah, it's mostly harm in fairness because that's the stuff of interacting with strangers. Right. But if you have a good example of someone being disrespectful, someone cursing out a teacher, there was one girl's life was ruined when she was in Arlington National Cemetery and the sign said, please be quiet and respectful. And so she and her friend think it would be funny to pose with that sign giving the finger and pretending to scream. Funny, right?

Okay. Well, that's a pretty good way to get the entire right third of the country to want you dead. So, you know, I used to study taboo violations. All these moral foundations, I can come up with taboo violations that will go viral. So I wouldn't judge by the frequency. The frequency and intensity are different. So what's the hairbrain part? Like, I actually agree, you know, it's like, it's like common sense.

Like, obviously, most of the intellectual parts of America lean left. The left dominates all of the knowledge-creating institutions. Well, the hairbrain part is linking that, right? So it's like the research around social media and mental health is that the liberals are, there's far worse outcomes for liberals when they use it. And then the hairbrain part is like, my anecdotal experience, I don't have any data on this, is that, harm and care violations and fairness violations. Right. That's actually a very good insight because what we see I kind of traced out with my hands before,

like, you've got these little gaps and then they widen. Yes. So something happened to accelerate those differences. Gene Twenge is shown by looking at the time you stay and all that. So liberal, so I think liberal girls used to use, they were used to be online like the same as conservative girls. But in the period we're talking about after 2012, liberal girls go way up and conservative girls only a little in terms of the total time use. Yeah.

So liberal girls are by far the biggest consumers of social media. And I think what you're saying is social media is like catnip for the liberal brain in search of outrage. Yes. And it's not quite as effective for conservatives. Now of course they've got, you know, I mean, 4chan, A Chan, I mean, I don't even know. There'll be all kinds of, but on sort of the mainstream, but right, I actually agree with you that

there's some kind of feedback loop where social media is particularly tuned to ruining the left. And it's and again, this is just, we're still anecdotal here, but I have received hate mail. So in my sample size of hate mail that I've gotten over the years, which is at this point, thousands, it's always been interesting because the hate mail from the right, you know, they'll call me an idiot, they'll call me all sorts of bad names, you know, you're terrible, you're what's wrong with this country, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's always at the end of the at the end of the email rather

There's always kind of this attitude of I hope you'll change right like you're a smart guy I hope you'll change whereas the hate mail from the left First of all it's always around harm it's like this thing you wrote is harming people You are morally responsible you're part of the problem You should delete the thing you wrote you should delete the article you should delete the book chapter you should delete the the podcast and you should stop you should stop being in public right and well that's cancel culture right there yeah you should you should disappear you need to and if you won't disappear you need to be disappeared we need to stop you yeah it's it's interesting

and now we're getting a little bit off topic but it's interesting because when you know when I was a kid in the 90s and early 2000s the left was it felt like the left was the optimistic side of the political spectrum the left was was pro technology. The left was, you know, things are going to change. They're going to be different. They're going to be better. And it's, again, somewhere around this area, early 2010s, it feels like that flipped. Yeah. There was an interesting article. Derek Thompson had an interesting article in the Atlantic on why is it mostly the Anglosphere? Because, and I've done a lot of, Zach and I've done a lot of research showing here are the five Anglosphere nations.

Boy, are they, I mean, they're doing exactly the same thing at the same time. Like, whatever it is that calls this in America, girls started checking into psychics. psychiatric boards in New Zealand at the same time in Australia. So the Anglosphere is standing out as we used to be among the happiest countries in the world and now our kids are have really fallen. But it isn't just the Anglosphere. I think Derek overstated the degree to which it's just the Anglosphere. It's especially Protestant countries which are the freest Catholic countries and Eastern Orthodox

countries in Europe are more binding. So I think there is something to what you're saying. It is an amplifier. Yeah. You jumped ahead to my next question, which was I wanted to get into the international question, which is predominantly Anglo, Nordic to a lesser degree, or Northern Europe to a lesser degree. But when you look at Eastern Europe, especially when you look at East Asia, you don't see it at all. Right.

But look at it this way. What Zach has found, because he had, he got there, you know, there's international data. There's a few studies. it's not nearly as plentiful as American data. But when you go through, what is HB, S, H.S, I forget the name of the, the data on teens is very scarce internationally. What Zach found is that the one region where we had data in Europe, the one region that's getting more religious is Eastern Europe.

Now, Eastern Europe was a miserable place for many, many decades. And so in some sense, Eastern Europe is joining the world. Things have been getting better for the most part. And also they've been getting more religious because religion was suppressed. So we think religion, again, we think religion has a lot to do with it. Now, East Asia is a miserable place. I mean, the kids are miserable. I spent some time in Korea.

In Korea, there has not been childhood for 50 years. All they do is study for exams. I mean, there's no child. It's horrible. They have very high suicide rates. But they are communal and collectivist. Yes. So it fits perfectly with my theory to say when the tidal wave came,

we don't see the big increases in mental illness in East Asia that we saw in the rest of the developed world. So again, I think all of this fits with the idea that community is very, very protective. Yeah, I went, I don't know if you're familiar with Geert Hofsteed. Oh, yeah. Cultural Dimensions Theory. So I went and looked up, one of his cultural dimensions

is individualism versus collectivism. I was curious. I went and looked up the most recent measurements of most individualistic countries. Tell me if these sound familiar. United States, number one, Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, and then a smattering of European countries after that. Keep going.

Hungary, which is interesting. Italy, Belgium, Denmark, France, Sweden, Ireland. That's as far as I went. Okay. So that's interesting. So the Scandinavians are, it's variable. Scandinavian is not what people think. I mean, in some ways, Scandinavia grants kids incredible autonomy to make their own lives.

So I'm surprised that they didn't appear as more individualistic on that. Yeah. But it's variable. But yes, Zach looked into, when he looked at the European countries, is it religion that matters? Is it GDP? Is it GDP? Is it individualism?

All of them matter because all of them are also cross-correlated. So, yeah, so all of that stuff matters. But actually make another point about the international differences. This entire debate has been carried out with one set of dependent variables, one set of outcome variables, which is mental health, mental illness. But when you look at what a phone-based life does to your child, you know, you know, you Even if your kid is not depressed or anxious, very few parents would say, oh, as long as long as you're not depressed anxious, it's okay.

I mean, I don't mind if he never reads another book. I don't mind if he sits indoors all day, doesn't get any nature. I don't mind if he can't pay attention to anything, as long as he's not depressed and anxious. Like, no, we want a lot for our kids. We don't want them to just be on the phone and screens all day long. So even in countries where, like in Spain is one of the only European countries where anxiety depression did not go up. But in Spain, everybody sees the problem too, because it's not just about anxiety depression. It's like our kids can't, you know, they can't make eye, the boys can't

make eye contact, kids have trouble paying attention. Look, we grownups have trouble paying attention because our phones and our screens and everything's interrupting us. So once you broaden the set of outcome variables and say, this isn't just an argument over which line goes up on depression, which doesn't. This is a complete transformation of how you exist. on this planet. It happened in five years, 2010 to 2015. Our kids are not thriving. Even those that are not mentally ill, I think they're, I think they're not on average, not achieving levels of flourishing that they would have if they had a normal childhood. To that point, I don't have the exact numbers. I didn't write them down. But I've seen data before of standardized testing

worldwide. Yeah. There you go. And it's going back decades, every generation is smarter, gets higher test scores. It gets higher test scores than the years before. And in the late 2010s, it stops. No, not late 2010s. 2012. 2012 is a turnaround point. And it stops.

And that is cross-cultural, as I understand it. That's right. It's global. And so the first sign of this was what's called the Nate, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It's called the Nation's Report Card. And it made big news like a year or two ago when it was clear that if we saw these graphs, look how much we lost during COVID.

And that's true. And you close down schools, which we should never have done. You close down schools for years in some cases. Yeah, kids have a learning loss. But what I saw in those graphs was it wasn't like we were making steady progress until COVID. No, we were making steady progress from the 70s through 2012 and then it starts going down. And the loss from COVID was a little bit larger on average, depending on the field, than the loss from 2012 to 2020. But that was quite substantial.

For every generation, for 100 years, we've been getting smarter and smarter, better education, better health care. The Flynn effect, IQ literally has been going up. That stopped. Okay, so that's the American data. Then there's also the PISA data, the program on international, whatever, scholastic, I forget what it is, but it's the global assessment of educational progress. I think that's the one I saw, yeah.

And so that is also astonishing. There, it doesn't go back far enough to see the long rise. And this is what Derek Thompson had in a previous article was you can see right at 2012, it's taken every, I think, three years. And right at 2012, everything starts to drop. And so think about it this way. I'm unlocked in this argument with other researchers about what percentage of the variance is explained by the raw number of hours.

And the effect sizes are tiny here and we're all arguing about that. Sure. And at the same time, all around the planet, young people, an entire generation, is less Less intelligent and less educated than the previous generation. And not all around the planet, but in a third or a half of the planet, young people, especially girls, are more depressed and anxious. And so I think what's happening here is the largest destruction of human capital. I mean, I can't say in history because obviously World War I and World War II, they destroyed

but in terms of like what has ever destroyed human potential around the world other than the world wars? Probably nonviolent destruction of human capital. Yeah, that's right. That's right. really bad. But, you know, but that was a Eurasian thing. Like, I don't think, you know, that didn't hit the Americas. I don't think I didn't, you know, it was a Eurasian thing. But yeah. So, so this is not just about depression. This is about the global destruction of human capital in

young people. Okay. I mean, it's just unbelievable to me that we allow kids to bring a smartphone into class in their pocket. You know, when I was a kid in the 70s, if they said you can bring in your TV, you can bring in your VCR, you can bring your Waki Talkies, you bring in your band, you bring your painting set, you know, like that, that iPad commercial. Like every possible entertainment thing is crushed down into an iPad or an iPhone. How about if you bring all of it in, you can use it during class, just wear your headphones so that you know, you're not bothering other people, although actually sometimes you do. Yeah. So it's completely insane that we, that kids are having, holding smartphones in class. Funny story about that. So I went to, I'm from Austin,

Texas, and I went to, I went to high school with Michael Dell's kids. Okay. And this was around 2000, 99, 2000. And, you know, everybody was really, really, you know, I'm going to, I'm really excited about technology. And so they, the school announced a joint venture with Dell computers. Every kid should have their own computer. Exactly. That's what we thought in the 90s. We were so wrong. Exactly. And so every kid in the high school, every kid got a laptop. Yeah. And we started taking laptops in every class and we take notes on it. Within two months, every teacher hated it. Yeah. Every single teacher was like, I remember I had a history teacher who used to say like, all right, pull out your $3,000 pencil.

And like they... Were you all connected to the internet? Yes. Right. And the thing I presume if they hated was the internet because it wasn't that you were typing. Yes. It was that you were browsing, you were doing things.

Well, and the funny thing was, was, you know, initially we had access to the internet so we could go research and cross-reference, all sorts of stuff while the teacher was talking. Of course, all the kids just ended up on gaming sites and, you know, instant. I'm sure there was porn. Oh, tons of porn, instant messaging each other. It was a disaster. And so then they started taking away Wi-Fi within certain classes.

Like teachers could request to have the Wi-Fi taken out of certain classrooms. But then kids just downloaded games onto their computer. And so it also started to feel like a $3,000 pencil. Like it started to feel ridiculous that like, why am I typing this when I could just like write in my notebook? Right. So within this, by the next school year, they were pretty much all gone. From your school. From my school.

But what happened around the country was the belief that there was, what was it called, the something gap? The idea was all the rich kids have computers at home and the poor kids don't. So we have to close the, what was the name of it? We have to close the something gap. And so it's a matter of vital political importance that we get laptops or iPads into every classroom one to one. Yeah. And of course, the schools where the tech people send their kids to, like the Waldorf school, the peninsula, they don't allow any tech at all.

There's a computer room so they can learn how to program. But they understand the importance of paying attention in class. So the rich kids have more controls on them. They have less technology in school. Whereas the lower SES kids, their schools are stuffed with free iPads. I don't know. I assume they're free. I don't know, phone books and iPads.

Sure. Because the tech companies, of course, they want to. to hook the kids early on their brand, you know, whether it's Apple or Android or whatever. So yeah, it was a huge mistake. Yeah. Yeah. And that might be, so intelligence and learning are going down since 2012. We don't know that that's because of the phones or because of the Chromebooks and iPads.

I really don't know. All we know is that beginning around 2012, kids could not pay attention in school and loneliness in school goes up then. Because kids are not paying attention to each other. Right. And when a school goes phone free, one of the universal things they say are most common is we hear laughter in between classes now. It used to just be silent. Yeah.

Okay. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on anti-aftsau. acids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero, more like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. I want to throw another analogy at you and feel free to completely just refuse to accept it. But I do think it raises an important distinction that is worth talking about. Cigarettes versus alcohol, right? Cigarettes, it's bad for everybody. It's bad. No matter how, whether you smoke five or 10 or 20, it's the more you smoke, the more it's more it's bad for you, regardless of who you are, where you're from. Alcohol, the majority of people who

consume alcohol, it doesn't really affect them negatively. They're completely functional. They're completely happy. It maybe makes their life a little bit better. But there's a small minority that the outcome is so negative and so bad that it could potentially skew the overall data. So my question to you is social media and phones, is it cigarettes or is it alcohol? It's much more alcohol. Okay. But let's go with the alcohol analogy. So first of all, alcohol doesn't just affect those who drink it. The reason why we wasted two amendments to the U.S. Constitution is not because some people

are getting drunk and isn't that a shame they're hurting themselves because they were beating their wives and gambling away all the money. So alcoholics ruined not just their own lives. They put an incredible toll on, especially on women and children. And it's illegal for teenagers. That was my next point. Yes. And we have warning labels on it because if you drink, you're harming your fetus. So, you know, look, I have a lot of libertarian sympathies.

You know, part of the righteous mind was you need the wisdom of the liberal impulse, the conservative impulse, and the libertarian impulse. You need a good society. You need all three of them speaking up and making their arguments. So I don't think I've ever said anything about limitations on what adults can do. I'm not saying we should ban social media for adults. There are some issues about identity, authentication, that would be helpful in certain things. But I'm not telling adults what to do. But at the same time, I'll be damned if the most powerful companies in the world have every legal right to grab my kids without my knowledge, get data from them, harm them.

They have perfect protection against lawsuits. I can't even sue them for what they do to my kids. I mean, this is a completely insane situation. So I'm guessing you brought that up in part because the Surgeon General last week called for warning labels on social media, saying something like social media can be. harmful to the mental health of adolescence, something like that. I think he's absolutely right, and here's why. In fact, just this morning preparing for an interview, I just looked up on a whim and said, okay, how many kids actually choke to death in this country from toys?

The answer, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, is something like a dozen. About a dozen kids, no, no, no, it's less than that. About a dozen kids a year in this country are killed by a toy. Now, thousands of thousands, I think go to the hospital. There are injuries. Sure. But death, it's about a dozen, and they said the majority of those are choking. Okay, we put warning labels on toys that a kid can choke on because we want parents to pay attention.

Like, even though it's very rare, you know, six or seven kids a year will choke to death from toys. Okay. What about social media? Well, let's just look at choking. How many kids choke to death every year because of social media? You know, there's the choking challenge. Can you have, you know, wrap something around your neck until you pass out and videotape it on your camera.

And then when you come out of the unconsciousness, you post it. Isn't that amazing? Like, what insane thing to do? Okay. But this is a viral video challenge and how many kids have choked to death? We can't get a clear number, but the estimate was Bloomberg covered something or other, the estimate was around a dozen, you know, in the last year. So it's in that ballpark.

My point is about a dozen kids have choked to death just on TikTok, which is more than have choked to death on all the toys combined, all other toys. So I think it might be reasonable to put a warning label on TikTok. Warning, this could lead to you choking yourself to death. Now, I'm kidding. You don't want that warning. Sure. But I want to give a sense of scale here.

Choking deaths are a tiny, tiny portion of the deaths related to social media. Mostly it's suicide. It's overwhelmingly suicide. Let's take sex stortion. Hundreds of thousands of boys are sex-storted every year. And the FBI looked into, I think, 15,000 cases in which they found 20 suicides that were directly related to the sex distortion. Yeah. For people who don't know, sex distortion, it's though somebody who will create a count with a really beautiful woman.

Very sexy. Scantily clad, message the guy, send a bunch of, you know. Racy photos. Yeah, exactly. And then ask for a dick pick. And then once they have the dick pick. And the face. So the face and the dick.

And the face, face and the dick. And then once they have that, then they, they reveal, I know all your contacts because you and I are connected on Snapchat or Instagram. And so this obviously is the most horrible. I mean, this is, you know, the whole, and it's always a boy. Girls don't fall. Girls not so stupid is to believe that as random, you know, random hot girls going to message them. Yeah.

So my. So my point is of just the suicides. Yeah. I mean, the FBI identified 20, so it's probably hundreds because, you know, I mean, we don't even know. So when we look at all the parents whose kids committed suicide after extortion, after bullying, you know, now we're easily up into the hundreds. So if we have a consumer product that was not made for children, it seems to be harming lots of children.

It's killing hundreds and hundreds of children a year. And these companies cannot be sued. and there's no warning anywhere. So it's like, can you imagine any other product, anywhere on economy, that kids were using five hours a day, which is the average, five hours a day, hundreds and hundreds were dying, millions were depressed, tens of thousands were, I don't know what the number, the ballpark figure, tens of thousands checking into emergency rooms for self-harm. Like, this is beyond, you know, this is you take all the toys in the world to multiply

them by a thousand. Right. You don't have the level of damage being done by social media. Yeah. Yeah, not to mention all the things like the extortion or the cyberbullying that can be enabled through it. Yeah, the cigarette and alcohol thing I think is that's a little bit more selfishly like my industry. What do you mean? Well, in the self-help world, it's people deal a little bit too much in absolutes, right?

So it's it tends to be like, you know, there's a small minority of people that social media is a real problem in their life. They're addicted to it. They're hooked to it. It makes them miserable. And so, yeah, they probably should either. cut way back or cut it out entirely, but, you know, the majority of adults are probably okay or as long as the usage is moderate, then it's probably okay. But that's not a sexy message that gets lots of clicks on Twitter. Yeah, but it does work perfectly for social media because,

you know, there are many benefits to social media for adults. Yes. They are originally social networking systems. There are lots of reasons why adults need to talk to strangers and get their message out to strangers and in your industry, it's all about reaching out to a broad public. What the hell need does an 11-year-old have to talk to strange men around the world? Like, what networking are they doing? Yeah, and I think what people, what people haven't, it has not caught up with the public yet, that it's, it used to, social media used to be mostly social and a little bit of media. Now it's mostly media.

Like it's, now it's 95% of my social media use has nothing to do with the people I know in my wife. That's right. So the big change. So the big change happens from the news feed. So originally these things were called social networking systems. And that's what they were referred to, SNS, social networking systems. Because the original ones, I think Friendster was the first in MySpace.

And they come in a very quick succession around 2003, 2004. So you got MySpace Friendster and then the Facebook, which becomes Facebook. Those are the big ones early on. And they're just about connecting. Yeah. And, you know, this is 2004, 2005 we're talking about. And the experience in the 90s was so amazing. The internet is so amazing.

And here's another amazing application. And then you get Uber. You can just press a button and a taxi. A car will appear magic. It's all magical. Yeah. Okay. And what we didn't realize, changing under our noses,

was the arrival of the news feed and then the like button and the share and the share and the retweet button. Now it's not about me checking in with you or me saying, hey, you know, here's my puppy. And he said, oh, he's adorable. Like, okay, that's a kind of connection. It's not about that. It's now about the newsfeed of stuff coming in. And it's 2009 that we get the like and the reach-preet button.

That is the beginning of super virality. And now, as you just said, it's really much more about the news feed and broadcasting. And so now we don't call them SNS. Nobody's heard the abbreviation SNS in a long time. They're called social media platforms. A platform is what you can stand on and yell and scream. And imagine a world in which instead of us talking to each other, everyone is on a platform, yelling and screaming. Is that a world you want to live in? Whether the answer is yes or no,

is that what you want to do to your 11-year-old? And I think the answer is no. Yeah. I like the alcohol comparison as well because it is nobody debates that an 11-year-old should not be drinking. That's right. There's no parent on earth that would even, you know, would watch little Susie drinking in the backyard and be like, oh, well, she seems occupied. She's going to be fine, right? Yeah. Wait, let's go even beyond that. Because this is a very, very, this is like the most important thing we have to do. The most important thing we have to do to really get out of this. Well, there's a several things which we'll get to.

But in terms of legal or legislative, it's age-gating. We have to have age-gating. There's none right now. As long as you're old enough to lie, you're old enough to be on porn hub to have 50 Instagram accounts, TikTok, anything. Imagine if we said, the drinking age is 21. But we can't expect bar owners to check IDs. No, no. Look, if you don't want your kid to drink, it's up to you.

You're the parent, you exercise responsibility. And if you run a gambling casino and you're luring in kids with candy and you get them on slot machines that have superheroes. It's the parents' responsibility. What are we going to have them like check ID at the door? Are you crazy? We can't do that. It's the parents' responsibility. That's obviously insane.

But that's where we are. It's become normal. Now it's the case. Fourth and fifth graders are getting smartphones. I was just in the UK, a quarter of their five to seven-year-olds have a smartphone. Wow. Now, I don't know if they're, not that they're on TikTok just yet, but they'll be there by the time they're nine. So, you know, it's like, you know, it's as though we're saying, you know, how about if, you know, if fifth graders, fourth graders have drinking parties and spend all day drinking, that's going to interfere with brain development.

Is there any data on platform by platform? Like which ones are the worst defenders? Yeah. Surprisingly not much. Usually studies are just asking how much social media do you use? And then it's a very crude measurement. When there are contrasts in general, so there are a few studies. So we have these huge long lists of studies.

If you go to anxious generation.com slash reviews. So whenever Google Docs has all the studies on social media mental health. One study compared Instagram to Facebook to solving a puzzle. and Instagram was much worse than Facebook for girls. I don't know if they had boys in the study. So I think Instagram is particularly bad for girls. What I'm coming to see, we don't have much research on this because it's so new. Most of the research was done on Facebook or Facebook and Instagram.

Instagram came out 2010 and popular 2012. But really what dominates kids' lives now is TikTok and then the short-form video. And then, of course, YouTube shorts and Instagram, they copy TikTok. So you've got these three short-form videos. I have not seen any research on it, but what I'm learning from talking to my students is this is like the worst stuff out there. So parents, if you're listening to this,

don't keep your kid away from the internet. Don't give it to them in their pocket. But if you want to be discerning about what you let your kid do when your kid's 12, 13, 14, keep them the hell away from the short form videos. Yes. Because the key distinction is that stories are good. Humans live in stories.

We've always told stories. As long as we've had language, we told stories. Whole societies are based on giant long stories committed to memory. Netflix is good. I asked my students, how many of you watch Netflix every week? Almost everybody. How many of you wish Netflix was never invented? Nobody.

Nobody. Stories are good. I asked them, how many of you watch TikTok or one of those short forms? Not all, but the great majority watch them. How many of you wish it was never invented, most of them? Wow. So the short form videos, they're designed to give you quick, cheap dopamine, variable ratio reinforcement schedules, rapid turnaround between behavior reward, behavior

reward on a variable ratio schedule, no redeeming value. Depending on what you click on, your feed might be just positive stuff, which is still a huge waste of time. But for a lot of the boys, again, I don't have data on this, but I'm just asking boys about this. A lot of the boys are seeing people getting run over by cars, the next-up in drug cartels. I mean, you're older, but... Stuff like that pops up on my feed, too.

It's somehow TikTok starts serving me like police brutality stuff. And I was like, guys, this is not what I'm here for. You know, like I don't know what the algorithm thought. But at least police brutality, you might think there's some political interest. Like this at least is relevant to public policy issues. But, you know, videos of Mexican drug cartels just memorand a person who's a lot. Yeah, I've seen people get shot. Yeah.

I mean, this is just, it's just the, it's just the horror. It comes out of nowhere too sometimes. It's interesting because, you know, one of my frustrations, as you mentioned so much of this research, like it started on Facebook. You know, it takes a long time to produce good research, right? And so there's a lag time. And I think the social media evolves so quickly. One of the things that worries me about this body of research is that to me, the big change came with the for you feed on everything. Oh, okay.

I don't use that. It's, it's, and it was pioneered by TikTok. Like it is kind of what made TikTok. TikTok is, you know, up until TikTok, all the platforms, they would look at who your friends were. Right, right, right. The authors you followed. TikTok didn't care.

The celebrities that you liked. Yeah, based on a social network. Right, and it would recommend based on your social network. TikTok, it took, they call it a psychograph. Yeah. Instead of a social graph, they took your psychograph. They're like, oh, well, he's a fan of, you know, and likes Quentin Tarantino movies.

So he's probably going to enjoy this police brutality video, right? Right, right. Yeah. And that's where I think the real rabbit holes started. And then since then, really post-pandemic, every other platform has copied the for-you feeds design. And so now we're all being recommended. That's really where it turned into more media than social.

So now it's more similar to television where, you know, I was, would come home from school. I didn't know what was on. I would just turn on the TV and whatever was being shown to me. That's what I'd sit there and watch. And it becomes a very passive experience. Yeah, that's right. And there's a real psychological difference between that passivity. That's right. There's a huge difference. Andrew Huberman helped me figure this. I was on his podcast about a month ago. And I asked him to like elaborate on some of the things that I say in the book about, you know, about neural development and puberty and dopamine and addiction. And he pointed out the difference between sort of the speed of reinforcement and what, I forget if this was his word,

but like cheap dopamine versus harder and dopamine. And so if you are working at something and then you get a reward, that feels great. That's like slow. It's sort of like the difference between eating, you know, nuts and legumes and, you know, carbs that are slow to digest and very healthy versus straight sugar or processed sugar. Yeah. And so in the same way, watching Netflix. the quality of stories on Netflix is so much greater than when I was a kid. You know, when I was a kid, I tried to show my kids, you know, when they were younger,

like I dream of Jeannie and Gilligan's Island. And they say, this is stupid. This is so stupid. You know, so the quality of stories has gotten much, much better. But that's more like, like, you know, whole grain, healthy stuff. You're watching a story. You may be learning something. And like reading a novel.

You're having human experiences. Whereas the short form, as you've been pointed out, if you're just getting that real quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. And TikTok, I guess what I'm hearing you say is the 4U feed, that was how TikTok basically engineered. We're going to find the fastest way to give you a little bit of dopamine. And if you have a constant supply of dopamine, your brain is going to adapt to that.

And your brain is going to downregulate so that now it takes more dopamine to get back to the same point. Yeah. So again, your original question here was, are the platforms all the same? Are there some differences? Hell yeah. For social comparison and girls, Instagram is probably the worst. For drug deals and nude pics, I'd say Snapchat.

I mean, it's kind of designed for that, it seems. And for just, you know, messing with your dopamine circuits and sucking up five hours a day, I'd say TikTok and its copieres are the worst. Again, if adults want to do this, you know, adults can go gamble. They can drink. They can smoke. They can do what they want. But, I mean, I cannot believe that these companies can get to my children. Right.

Now, of course, I have rules, but unless I keep them away from web browsers everywhere, I can't be sure that they haven't created accounts. I mean, I trust them, but I know that I can't fully trust them. Yeah. All right. Let's get into the prescriptions. You have four primary prescriptions in the book. First one is no phones in schools.

We've already kind of gone over that. That just seems like the most common sense of all. And that's happening all over the country, all over the world now. What sort of, because I know you've posted quite a bit, you know, results of schools that have experimented with this. Like, what sort of results are schools seen when they get rid of phones? So there's very little research on this, like with control conditions, it's very little. Yeah. But what we find whenever school does go phone free, what they find is that while the kids sometimes resist at first, by a week or two in, the benefits are so big that even the kids themselves say,

hey, wow, this is more fun. We're actually talking to each other. So the teachers love it. I don't know of any school that ever went phone-free and regretted it. Sometimes there's pushback from parents because some parents want to be able to text with their kids during class,

but that's not a legitimate desire in my opinion. So what we hear is there's better attention in school, better attention in class, better social life. And the kids are so lonely. Gen Z is the loneliest generation in history. Once you hook everybody up electronically, the time has to come from somewhere. It comes from the people around you. So when in 2012, when everybody started bringing a smartphone into class, they stopped talking

to the kid next to them. So they're lonely in school. When a school goes phone free, they're less lonely. They have better friendships. There's more fun, more excitement. So this is just like magic. And there really is no argument against it. It was just that schools, many principals were afraid to anger the parents.

that would object. And is this something that principles can do on their own? They don't have to wait for legislation. It depends. It depends on the state. And what they just announced last week was we're going to make it, we're going to make it mandatory. You have to go phone free.

Which, of course, should have been done back in 2010, but is happening now. California is doing it. And it's happening in red states and blue states. Utah, Arkansas, Florida. They've been leaders on this. I think conservative states really see the struggles families are having. They want a family-friendly policy. But New York, Governor Hockel, has introduced all kinds of really good measures

that would reduce the damage that these things do to kids, the exploitation. So we're seeing it across the spectrum. Okay. Second one is no social media before 16. So what's the reasoning behind 16? So the key idea for all my recommendations is I'm coming up as a social psychologist, which means I especially study the effects we have on each other. And the main reason why kids have to be on social media,

even when they know it's bad for them, a lot of them do, especially the older ones, is because everyone else is on and they don't want to be alone. And so that's called a collective action problem. Everyone ends up with a suboptimal outcome because of what everyone else is doing. But if we could just get a bunch of us to step off together and we go play with each other, we go have fun,

we go to amusement parks, we go hang out of each other's homes the way kids used to. Now it's like appealing and now you can, now other kids can do it too. So social media is much more addictive than cigarettes in the sense, not biologically, but in the sense that with cigarettes in the worst years of teen smoking, it was only a third of kids of high school students who smoked. But you don't find any high schools where only a third of the kids are on social media. It's everybody or nobody or 90% or nobody.

So ideally, you know, I think the age of, should really be 18. If we're just looking from a health perspective, social media is wildly inappropriate for minors. We usually protect kids from extreme graphic sexuality, extreme graphic violence and addiction, those three things. Social media is all of those three things. So really the age should be 18. But my goal is not to say what's the optimal age health-wise. My goal as a social psychologist to say, how do we break out of this trap? And if I were to advocate for 18, we wouldn't get it. Right.

So I decided that 16 is really the age. Now, I think that's a nice compromise where we could get it. And I have a whole chapter on puberty on how we used to have graded, you know, at some birthdays when you're 13, you get certain rights, when you're 16, you get certain rights, when you're 16, you get certain rights. So I think 16 is the age that we should be letting kids on social media. I wonder, because YouTube spun out a YouTube kid a number of years ago. And it's basically, it's like a sister platform functions the exact same way, but it's only kids content.

Yeah. And it's like everything's very highly screened and moderated there. Part of me wonders is like if these platforms can't just all do the same thing, right? It's like just. Yeah. So I, you know, I had a conversation. I've had conversations with two of the top, top leaders at YouTube. And I realize I don't know enough about YouTube kids in particular.

Yeah. If it was the case that the company is getting data from them and using that to market to them and they are posting stuff, then I'd say no way, no way. But YouTube is more of a giant video repository for the world. I already said stories are good. So I can definitely, again, I need to spend time on it, but I can definitely imagine you could have something for kids so that they can see stories and it would be okay. It's also, it's longer form as well, you know, and it's, I think the largest children's brand,

or one of the largest way. It's called Cocoa Mellon. It started as a YouTube channel. Now it's all over Netflix and Hulu and everything. But what about kid? What about child influencers? What about seven, eight, nine, ten-year-olds who are on YouTube and, you know, with their parents,

but they're making a lot of money. It makes me feel really weird. I've actually, you know, in the YouTube world, there's a lot, you come across a lot of, they call them family influencers. But it's really, it's, you know, parents pushing a child star. It's that all over again, right? That's right.

Yeah, we don't let kids work in coal mines. There are a lot of places we don't let kids work. Yeah. And I think we'll look back on this and ultimately we'll see that kids should not be full-time brand managers. They should not be, you know, the English have a phrase, don't raise your, don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington, which is a line from an old Noel Coward song.

And it's just the idea that if you grow up on a stage, the audience is going to change you. Right. And we've seen this, you know, audience capture for some, some influences. Right. And you probably, you don't develop the, you know, the audience. normal, healthy relationships. Everything is very transactional, right? So you-performative.

Yes, yes. All right, third one, no smartphones before high school. So this one is very, very important because even though I love my smartphone, the, you know, the iPhones are amazing. It will long be remembered as one of the most important pieces of technology, consumer technology ever. And but it is the portal. So the internet, as I've said, is wonderful overall, but having

24-7 access to the internet means that you are now much more prone to addiction. You are much more accessible to extortion gangs around the world, to perverts and sex predators. And so that's the line. You don't want your kid to cross. So by all means, have a computer in your living room and let your kids on it and let them search for things sometimes. But the day that you give your child an internet-enabled device that they, in a sense,

own. It's mine. I customize it. I put the apps on that I want. I have access to it, if not all day long, at least most of the day. That is a major transition in your child's life. And for many kids, when you give them the iPhone, it will be at the center of their life for the rest of their life.

You know, when they come into college, the phone's already at the center of their lives. In my flourishing class at NYU, we do a lot to sort of like pull it away so they can see nature, they can see each other. So my argument, again, is really focused on puberty. The longer you can delay getting your kids sucked into a screen, the longer, the further they can get in puberty before they do that, the better. So I'm not saying keep kids off of video games until 14 or 16. But yeah, you know, if your 10, 11, 12 year old is playing three or four hours of video games a day, that's probably bad. Yeah.

And if your 10, 11, 12 year old daughter is spending three or four hours a day on social media or just, you know, that's probably really bad for her. Yeah. So, you know, in the U.S., we have a big break at high school. The rule in the U.S. is no smartphone before a high school. Now, internationally, a lot of schools have more of the U.K. model where their secondary school begins around age 11 or 12, and it ends around 16. So the parents' groups in the UK are saying no smartphone before the end of secondary school, which is 16.

Oh, wow. Ideally, that would be great, but the world kind of requires you to have a smartphone for a lot of things nowadays. And I want kids to be out in the world, independent. going places, taking Ubers. So, you know, I hope they can get that to work, and I hope the world will adapt back so that it doesn't demand that to be out in the world,

you must have a smartphone. Yeah. But I'm pretty comfortable saying, you know, before high school, give them a flip phone, give them a phone watch. You can text them, you can call them, but don't give them a thousand apps and the Internet all the time. Yeah. And then the last one, more outdoor play, free-range kids.

Tell us about that. So I was really influenced by a woman named Lenore Skenezi who wrote a book called Free Range Kids. It's a wonderful book. If you have kids before eighth grade or certainly if kids in elementary school younger, please read Free Range Kids. Lenore is so amazing. She helped me and my wife really let go with our kids and send them out on errands in New York City when they were beginning fourth grade, which you know, I mean, you and I probably out much younger than that, but now it's more like sixth grade.

We kind of let kids walk three blocks to a store. So Lenore really encouraged us to give our kids more independence and we could see exactly what she was talking about. They come back from an errand and they're more confident. They have a better sense that they can act in the world, they can do things. It's amazing. So the fourth norm is really, really important because the first three are about taking away screens, about not having, you know, 10 hours a day on a screen.

But if you're going to take away the screens, you have to give them something to do, why not give them the normal healthy thing to do, which is play with each other. go have adventures, go climb a tree, go get into a little bit of trouble. Right. So this is the hardest norm, I would say, because it actually requires us parents to overcome our own fears. And I'm not saying we should just kick our kids out at 3 o'clock and say, don't come back until the streetlights come on, because that was the usual rule.

That's how I grew up, yeah. And you and I grew up, well, I grew up during the crime wave. You grew up, you had it early on. Yeah. But now the world's very safe physically, but we don't let our kids out. We don't trust our neighbors anymore. So I think people have to be more intentional. Like you can't just say get out of your kid, go find other kids to play with because there aren't other kids out there to play with.

But if you're a parent, you are surely connected to the parents of your kids' friends because you had to pick them up at a birthday party. I mean, you just, you know, you talk at school, whatever it is. You know, text with them, say, you know, hey, I read this book, you know, The Anxious Generation and they suggest that we do this together. We give our kids a fun, adventurous childhood like we had, but we have to do it. it together. Are you in? Like, it could start as simple as every Friday, these five kids who are friends, every Friday they get together. They can start at any of our houses. They can go to, you know, if it's possible, they can go, they can ride bicycles, you know, oh, one of you guys has a trampoline. One of you has something. Let them take some risks. So this fourth norm, this is the really positive

one. This is the, I think, the inspiring one. And this is the way I think will really convince the kids especially is we're not just saying, you know, get off your phone. We're saying, how about go have some fun with your friends. Yeah. I've heard from a number of parents that the struggle with this is the other people in their community. Yeah. Because they get judged for it. A lot of other parents will judge them for it.

That's right. You hear these horror stories of people having the cops called on them because the- I have friends who that's happened to. The kids. So what advice do you give to people in that situation? So, right, if you're the only one doing it, you are taking a risk. And the risk is more that your neighbors will, because if they call the police, the police will then refer it to C child protective services, and then it's a bureaucratic nightmare for years. So you are taking a risk if you're the only one.

So Lenore is so important that a few of us convinced her to stop just being an author and to found an organization to make her more effective. It's called Let Grow. So I'm on the board of it. So if parents go to LetGrow.org, we have our most powerful program solves the problem you just asked about. It's called the Letgrove project. And you can do it at home as a family or a few families, but it works best at a school. So imagine, and this is happening all over the country now, there's a school in Long Island that really that we've studied especially. Imagine that you have an elementary school, everyone, let's just take a third or fourth grade

class. The assignment is every month, here's a handout, you bring it home to your parents. Find something that you think you can do on your own that you've never done before. working out with your parents get agreement. Maybe it's walk the dog. Maybe they've never let you walk around the block with the dog. Maybe it's, you know, walk to the store and buy a quart of milk or buy a candy bar if there's a place that you can walk within a few blocks.

And so they agree. And then the kid does it. And the first time they do it, and I've heard this from a lot of parents, the parents are nervous as hell. Yeah. Like, you know, can she make it? You know, and of course the parent was doing this when they were seven. Of course, yeah. But we don't think our nine-year-olds can do this.

But they do. And then it's like, you know, the kid is so excited and the parents are, are proud. And then it's easier for them to let them go the second time. But now what, and then, and of course, it's a school assignment. It's a homework assignment. I can't be called a bad parent for letting my kid do this. It was homework. And now imagine a town in which all the elementary schools are doing this.

And everybody's now seeing seven, eight, well, let's name it not seven, but eight, nine-year-olds. We're seeing eight-nine, nine-year-olds walking around, doing the shopping, walking the dog, riding their bicycles. Now the whole town transforms. And now no one can call the police. Yeah. That's great. How optimistic are you of some sort of political regulation or policy change?

Because it's, you know, the parent thing is great. But you mentioned it earlier, right? Like the kids who are going to benefit the most from parents who read a book like yours and understand the research, it's going to be the wealthy, well-to-do parents. Married, yeah, two parent families. Yeah, that's right. So to get the most equal outcome here is some sort of wider regulation or policy change. What is your optimism level on that?

So policy change is happening all over the place. Nothing yet from the federal government since 1998. The Internet's changed a lot and the federal government has done nothing, 0.0 new laws or regulations. But that might change. The Kids Online Safety Act is the one measure. it does a lot of things to make the online life less painful and toxic and damaging to kids. That, I hope, I'm not sure when this will air, but Senator Schumer, if you or any of your people or constituents, including me, are listening.

Please introduce COSA. Please, you know, it's passed through all these committees. It has this huge bipartisan support. President Biden would sign it. So please, let's pass the Kids Online Safety Act. The most important thing beyond COSA is age gating. And that's going to be difficult, but the industry can solve it. They can solve anything.

They just don't want to because it's difficult. And they'll lose a lot of users. There's a lot of young users. Well, I mean, I will say, as somebody who has to, like, verify his profile on all these platforms and usually means I have to send in a picture of my passport or my driver's license. The technology has gotten good enough. I mean, you can send it, you can take a picture of my driver's license. Yeah. And within 10 seconds.

That's right. The platform knows I am who I am. That's right. That's right. So there are a lot of things. So like with banking and finance, we have know your customer laws. Yes. And things would be really terrible and crazy if anybody could bring a bag of money into a bank

and no names asked. They, you know, so there are a lot of, I'm not saying this should be universal across the internet. But imagine if there was a social media platform like Twitter or Instagram or whatever on which everybody truly was verified. And nobody was a Russian agent. Nobody had some psychopathology that made them a complete jerk and they'd been kicked off 20 times and just made 20 new accounts each time. Life online would be so much better if there was some sort of identity, authentication.

And to be clear, it doesn't mean you have to post with your real name. Yeah. But you have to at least, if you're going to have a relationship with these powerful companies, you have to show that you were a real person. And then if you misbehave, they can block you from opening another account. You described the most straightforward method, which is you show your driver's license or passport. But there are many, many other methods. And so what I'm hoping will have is that Congress, let's say, would pass a law, and even state legislatures can do this.

Congress would pass a law saying if you want to, if you want to do business in this kind of way, you have to offer a menu of age verification or identity to authentication methods. And, you know, Congress shouldn't mandate. Some bills do. They say, they must do this. Congress shouldn't mandate how they do it. They should just say, you know, you're responsible. And there's facial recognition, there are various blockchain methods.

There are all kinds of methods. And if Congress says you have three years to do this, they're going to figure it out very quickly. Yeah, very true. In ways that will not threaten privacy. I do appreciate that showing your government ID to get on Pornhub puts you at risk because if Pornhub is hacked, now everybody. So I appreciate that. This is a hard problem.

I'm not saying just to snap our fingers and make it go away. But we're not even, I mean, we've got to work on it. Yeah. Jonathan Haidt. It's been a pleasure. Mark Manson. Thank you so much. Thanks to you.