Soul Boom - Jonathan Haidt: Can Gen Z Survive?

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

Rainn Wilson chats with social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt ('The Anxious Generation', 'The Coddling of the American Mind') about the profound impacts of digital technology on society and mental health. They delve into the anxiety, challenges and transformations faced by Gen Z due to smartphones, Tik Tok and Instagram, exploring solutions to mitigate these effects and emphasizing the importance of reconnecting with community and spirituality. This episode offers crucial insights for anyone interested in understanding and improving our digital landscape. Tune in to uncover how we can navigate the complexities of a tech-dominated world and foster healthier, more connected communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think they're going to look back on this period from about 2020 to 2030 or 35 as an enormous turning point in human history. And it could go really, really badly. And it could be that we somehow come out of it and create the greatest societies ever know. Hey there. It's me, Rain Wilson. And I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, in idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. So just to let me, I'll just lay out the thesis very briefly, just so that listeners and viewers know what, you know, where I'm coming from and why

I'm making these pronouncements about the future. So I'm a social psychologist at New York University Stern School of Business. I'm supposed to be studying capitalism and morality. I have a book contract to do that. That fits perfectly with my mandate at NYU Stern. Just thank you for your work. You know, I've been working on the mental health epidemic with my company Soul Pancake and now Soul Boom, which is a more specifically kind of spiritual solutions to mental health. I mean, speaking about mental health, my own mental health journey, and you were at the vanguard of this charge that the mental health epidemic is not entirely caused by, but is certainly led by this idea of kids being raised by screens and the toxic.

of social media, but it's a very clear path out. Do you believe that we can change these behaviors and reduce this mental health epidemic? Yes, I'm actually very confident that we're going to. Because normally you have to try to persuade people of things. Let's try to persuade kids not to smoke. Let's show them dirty lung. Kids know that it's not good for them.

That's right. You ask them about TikTok. They're like, I don't want to spend time on TikTok, and yet they spend time on TikTok. That's right. But where vices in the past, or like television, you know, we, you know, if parents are saying, watch less television, we'd say, no, you know, it's not harm, it's not bad for me, I enjoy it. This time around what's happening is everyone sees the problem.

I've referred to one of my recent Atlantic article, studied at the University of Chicago. They found that while college students are, they definitely don't want to be taken off of social media, most of them, if you say, what if everyone's off? Then they say, oh, yeah, sign me up for that. There's a question in the study. would you prefer to live in a world in which Instagram and TikTok were never invented? Most of them say yes. Wow, that's astonishing.

Because these platforms cause social traps. They cause collective action problems. I asked my students, why are you spending five hours a day on TikTok? Why don't you quit? They say, I can't quit because everyone else is on it and I need to keep up. I need to know what people are talking about. Gen Z sees the problem. All the adults see the problem.

I mean, they're kids or their kids' friends. and so, oh, these damn phones, let me turn this. Ah, sorry, I didn't turn this thing off. Oh, my gosh. They're always distracting us. You saw it here on. Damn, these things. Soul boom.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt, getting alerts, buzzing in his pocket, vibrating near his testicles, as he's trying to explain to us the dangers and perils of cell phone. This is what we do. This is what we do, folks. We're just on the cutting edge. You expose people. We tear them down and we I'm so thrilled for the work that you're doing. I've been saying for years to anyone who would listen,

hundreds of years from now we're going to look back on this time and we're going to realize that humanity committed its greatest social experiment without any data or research. And that experiment was let's put microcomputers in everyone's pocket with unlimited porn. unlimited distraction, unlimited algorithms that play on dopamine release systems, unlimited entertainment, and these social networks that create an approximation of community and friendship and unleash them by the hundreds of millions around the planet. And hey, let's just see what happens.

Because that's how technology has been working. It's just kind of like it's this snowball going down the hill. I didn't really expect humanity to kind of go from a flip phone to go, hey, wait a second, let's take a pause here and like really look at the ramifications of what we're doing. I remember when they came out, I was really excited. I was like, oh, my God, I have a phone. I don't have to print out a map from MapQuest.com and carry it in my car. I can have that in my phone and I can listen to podcasts and I can take a picture.

all at once and be in constant communication with my loved ones. Like there's no problem here. But tell me 100 years from now, what does humanity look back in the 2010s? And what does it take in about this giant social experiment? It's actually the whole generation. Something is wrong with the generation born after 1995. And it's very sharp.

If you're born in 1919- Now that's a big thing to say. Yeah. Something is wrong with the generation born in the late 90s, early 2000. Yes. So to be clear, I'm a social scientist. I'm not saying everyone in that. I'm just saying when you look at averages. Tenancies. When you look at the average tendencies on mental health measures, all sorts of other sociological measures, what you see is that in the 2000, the 1990s and 2000s, mental health was not really getting worse. On most measures, it was sort of similar suicide rates were coming down.

things were getting a little bit, bad stuff was sort of getting a little less common all the way to about 2010, 2011. Then all of a sudden, around 2012, 2013, almost everything goes up, especially related to depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide. Those four. Suicide begins a couple years earlier to go up, but it really, they all really- Would you throw loneliness in there as well? Absolutely, absolutely. Loneliness, although loneliness has been, some of them were going down and then up. Loneliness, the other pattern is a lot of things. like Lonelyners, they were going up slowly, and then they go up fast. So you always see an elbow right around 2013. And my argument in the book is that the period from 2010 to 2015... That's when the office was canceled. We figured it out. There you go. Thank you everybody. Thanks for tuning in. Everything went to hell as soon as you guys went off the air, because people

had no more sense of humor. But my argument is that that period was the great rewiring of childhood. So in 2010, almost all teens had a flip phone or, you know, another portable phone. But all you could do on it was text and phone calls. And so people used it to connect. Technology is great when it just connects people. But by 2015, it was entirely different. By then, about 70 or 80 percent of teens have a smartphone with a front-facing camera. They didn't have that before.

High-speed Internet, unlimited data plan, Instagram, Snapchat, all these other platforms. And all of these companies have been granted the right to interrupt you whenever they want. My students don't, young people don't seem to know to turn off notifications on everything or almost everything. By default, you download an app, you give another company permission to interrupt you. So my claim is that the technological environment in 2010 was not bad for teen mental health and a human being could still grow up and go through puberty. In fact, the millennials did. The millennials, I think the dividing lines that the millennials were largely done with puberty by the time, by the time everything moves to smartphones. It's the kids who were

early in puberty when everything was on to smartphones and Instagram and Snapchat. That is Gen Z. That makes you anxious. That deprives you of social development. That makes it harder for you to have face-to-face conversations. It makes it harder for you to focus. So the technological environment, I believe, derailed human development on almost every track, whether you're looking at social development, focus, attention, cognitive development, self-control, esteem, identity, politics, almost everything. At least that's my big claim in the book. What do you think?

I'm on board with that. You know, I have a teenage son. There's some positive aspects to this generation. Okay. Let's talk about them. I believe that him and his friends are far more emotionally sensitive. They're more compassionate, generally to the suffering of others and the differences of others. They're much more open to conversations about mental health.

My son and his friends are greatly attuned to what anxiety is, what depression is, what loneliness is. they have this in their in their lingo. The other thing that's good, I think, about Gen Z is that they don't accept things the way they are in a different way. Other generations have always rebelled against certain aspects of the way things. Yeah, but this generation is kind of like,

why do we have money? I mean, they'll literally like, why do we have a government? Why do we have, you know, you name it. Why do we have careers? Why does this work the way that it does? Why should I agree that, you know, the democracy the way it is, is the way it is?

Like they question everything at a very foundational level, which I think is a healthy kind of skepticism because it's not just like, fuck you, man, put power to the man. It's kind of like, you know, I'm being given all of these things as a reality. Like this is how economics work. This is how health care works. This is how education works. This is how the environment works. And this is how international relations work.

And they're kind of like, well, why? Why should I accept this? It's not working. I'm looking around. It's really not working. Why should I accept any of it? So those are some positive aspects. You want to address those?

Yeah, I do. Because, yeah, I'll agree with a little bit and then raise some problems with the other parts. So you and I were very shaped by the 1970s and 80s, and this was sort of a period where there were still male and female gender roles, and they were being questioned. And if somebody had said to us or to society in 1975, you know, in 2024, kids are going to be open to talk about mental health. You know, it was a stigma back then. And they'll be much more receptive to LGBTQ. We would have said, what's LGBTQ? We've never even heard of it.

So if you look at where we were in the 70s and then you describe what you said, that would look like progress. And in some ways it is. And certainly, I mean, the freedom, you know, that LGBTQ kids have, my sister is gay, one of my best friends is gay. And they, you know, they were ashamed and my, you know, male homosexuals were attacked. I mean, horrible, horrible. So all that is good. But in some ways, I think we go too far, especially, let's say, on the mental health, definitely we don't want We don't want kids who are depressed or anxious or bipolar or anything to feel a stigma, to feel ashamed of who they are.

We don't want that. And so that's progress. But what happens sometime, once everyone gets online, you get a big switch happening in the early 2010s, is mental illness becomes valorized. And that's terrible. That is horrible. When you say valorized, what does that mean? That the more you have it, the more you seem to have it, the more prestige you get. And the last thing we want to do is train young people, especially young women.

and young women are much more open to persuasion, not persuasion, but emotional sharing or emotional contagion from other girls. Do you notice this? The kids say, like, I have an anxiety disorder and they get like, oh, wow, that's how brave of you to share that? And they get like their flowers for that? Is that what you're saying? So, right, I don't see that myself because I'm not in these groups.

I'm not spying on it. Yeah, but from the data that you're compiling. From the data and from what girls have told me. I gave a talk in Australia years ago, and a 16-year-old girl came up. to me afterwards and said, thank you so much for what you're saying. All of my friends are depressed, and I have to act like I'm depressed. In order to fit in, especially on, began on YouTube, but especially on TikTok, TikTok is so powerful in valorizing extreme mental illness.

So, you know, dissociative identity disorder. Is this, you know, people feel as though they have multiple personalities, they have divisions. It's always been there at very low rates, but on DID, you know, D-I-D-Tick-Tock, the more extreme you are, the more followers and likes you get, which encourages other kids, especially girls, to be like that and to identify as that. And in psychiatry, they're what are called looping effects, where if you believe, well, I am this kind, let's say take anxiety, my anxiety, I have anxiety, I'm an anxious person, if you accept that diagnosis, and then someone says, hey, do you want to come out to a party?

You say, my anxiety says no. And if you don't expose yourself over and over again, you become more anxious. So in all these ways, valorizing mental illness. That's a little bit different because any psychologist would say, like if you have anxiety, you have to address it and you have to meet it head on. If you have anxiety about flying,

that doesn't mean you stop flying. No, it means you're gonna work on it. Exposure is the treatment. So that's just a bad adjustment to the fact that one views themselves of having anxiety. What I'm trying to say is that mental illness and seeing a therapist, all that was gradually destigmatized from the 70s and 80s when there was still a stigma.

By 2010, I think the stigma was largely gone. And then social media has done an amazing job of making that an attractive identity for many young girls. And this can explain why the curves, throughout the book, you'll see curves. They're like hockey sticks. The curves for girls are usually things are flat until 2012, and then boom, they go way up very sharply in a year or two. Whereas the curves for boys are generally slower. The boys, it's not like 2013 everything changed.

It's like, you know, they began to deteriorate in 2008, 2009, and then it gets faster in the 2010s. Because boys are not as affected by social media. Social media really did a number on girls. It draws them in, it trains them, it takes over their social lives, it preys on their insecurities. boys are on social media and they get harmed in a variety of ways, but they didn't instantly all make each other anxious the way the girls did. So I'm just saying, all the things you're saying are good things. They're good in some ways, but they actually also bring some bad things. What about that? What about the increased kind of empathy and compassion and emotional

connectivity to the suffering of others? Do you mean the suffering of others or do you mean the suffering of LGBTQ, African-Americans, and one or two other groups. Do you mean, you think they're generally more compassion to the suffering of human beings? I think so. I think they're much more attuned. My son and his generation, let's say late teens, early 20s, seemed to be very attuned to the emotional landscape in a way that we were all clueless about at age 20. Other people's feelings was just like not even on my radar. My own feelings wasn't even on my personal radar. Okay. Okay. I agree that that's been a change, but I want to point out there is an extraordinary increase in tolerance and acceptance of LGBTQ, lifestyles, race. There are certain things that are

politically potent and that are progress. But many people therefore assume because Gen Z is so tolerant about the issues that used to be, you know, exclusionary or discriminatory issues decades ago, because they're so tolerant and accepting, they must be generally tolerant and accepting. I don't think that's true. When... You're talking about canceling. Yeah, that's right. The idea that someone makes a mistake, says something stupid, and they're just shut out and shut out.

Exactly. The cruelty that young people will show. So they don't have empathy or compassion? Yeah, I don't think so. toward someone making a mistake and getting ostracized. There's a famous social psychology experiments called the Good Samaritan study. It was done at Princeton. These were seminary students at Princeton Theological Seminary.

And they were doing part of a study, and then they were told they had to go a couple blocks away to give a talk that was going to be recorded. And half were told, and, yeah, you have to be there at, oh, gosh, you have to be there in three minutes. And the other half were told, you have to be there at, you know, yeah, you're about 20 minutes, but you may have still head over now. And on the way over, there was a guy just lying there on the ground. And something was wrong with him. It wasn't clear what? He's lying there on the ground. And these are divinity students who they're going over to give a talk on the good

Samaritan. I mean, this is a kind of a really, you know, ironic. And sounds like something out of Dungeons and Dragons. The dungeon master's like, you're late to this magic user convention. and then there's someone on the ground. Do you pass them? Keep going. Okay. And so does it matter whether you're thinking about the Good Samaritan?

No, that doesn't make much difference as to whether you stop. But are you late or do you have time? That makes an enormous difference. So the late people would rush by the guy. That's right. So now let's look at the compassion of Gen Z. If once you move your social life onto your phone,

you have an infinite number of things you need to do. They're infinite. And it will expand to take up every available moment. Not for all kids. There are some kids that are able to put limits. But in the last Pew data, 45% of American kids say they're online almost constantly. So even if, you know, even if you're talking with your son, he'll still be checking. And even if he's looking at, he's thinking about it.

He's not fully present. There you go. Sorry. So my point is, Gen Z is always in the position of the study, of the subjects in that Princeton study, We're told you're late, you have an infinite number of things to do. Some of the things scrolling past you should feel compassion for. Oh, that's so bad. Oh, but then 10 seconds later you're on to another.

There's what's called compassion fatigue. We often feel much more compassion for a single person than we do for 100 people. So you can point to things that suggest that they're more sensitive. But I don't think, and I've seen, I know there have been some studies too. I just don't remember how they worked. I don't think that life online, in fact, that's one of the points of chapter 8 of my book, a life on a phone causes spiritual degradation in almost every way. I don't think it's making people more compassionate.

I think it's making them feel more overwhelmed, more dulled and inured and immune. I just don't think that's making you more compassionate. Again, I'll agree to disagree on this in that my son and his friends have a much larger emotional vocabulary. Okay. for an understanding of, I remember when I started therapy, my therapist had a chart on the wall with a wheel of human emotions.

So the therapist would say, like, how are you feeling? I'm like, lousy. Well, what does that mean? Point to the thing. And it's like, you know, angry, you know, incensed, outraged, disturbed. Like, it had really specific. And I had to kind of learn, because I had never been taught by my ridiculous parents. you know, how the world of emotions work.

And it was in my 30s and 40s that I learned about how feelings, but my son, and not just because of us and his friends, they will be able to tell you with much greater clarity. And you're confident that that's a good thing. Well, I think in the context of everything else that's falling apart, perhaps not, but I do think that we have to look at whatever strengths that Gen Z can harness themselves to say, hey, you have a much deeper, richer, emotional vocabulary,

and that will open the door to greater compassion for others and let that compassion lead to action. And can your generation, you know, overcome, and I want to talk to you about this, like how do they, right now, how do we pivot this generation? How does this generation pivot themselves to draw on their strengths to make their lives better

and the world better. I know you deal with this in your class on flourishing. So you're in a flourishing class at NYU. You're talking to a 21-year-old who grew up with a phone. What do you tell them about the corner that they need to turn to engage in human flourishing? So, right, so I teach a course

at the NYU Stern School of Business called flourishing. And what I focus on there is first regaining control of your attention. Nothing can happen if your attention is going to your phone. I have them turn off all their notifications except for five. You can keep on five apps like Uber. You probably want to know, you probably want Uber to give you updates when the car is coming. But turn off all alerts for breaking news.

Never ever let a news company don't give them permission to choose when to interrupt you. So first regain control of your attention. You can't do anything without attention. then regain control of your morning and your evening routine. Start your day off right, end your day right, get a good night sleep, recharge, take care of your body. Let's get the fundamentals right. And so once they do that, once you can clear out a little space in their heads,

then they can work on their specific. Everyone has to make, they have to change themselves, they have a self-change project. So everyone has to do what I just said. Control your attention, get your morning and evening routine. Those are the basics. Now, in the 16 hours or so that you have in between that, what are you going to do? And I would always put my money on doing something rather than improving your emotional vocabulary

or anything like that. Now, CBT is a little different. Learning cognitive behavioral therapy, that is a practice. That is internal. That is very powerful. But I guess where I'm sort of trying to get to with this is in response to your assertion that boys getting a really developed emotional vocabulary is going to be good for them. It might be, but it might not be. Boys and girls are really different, and it's hard for us to talk about today

because we're supposed to act like, oh, you know, gender is a social construction, and boys, you know, we should expect boys and girls to have the same emotionality. And that's just not true. Boys and girls are really different in what they like and what their path is to flourishing. And so I'll ask you this. Suppose you take 100 boys who are anxious, lonely, depressed, disengaged. Half of them were going to go through the sort of thing you're talking about. Let's help them understand their emotions. Let's help them make better decisions. Let's do social emotional learning. Let's go with all the stuff that Gen Z is being given. And let's try to get them through a psychological therapy pathway to mental health.

The other half, it's going to be action-oriented. They feel useless. This is more true for the boys and the girls. The boys say they feel useless. Their lives have no purpose. That's true for both sexes. Boys need to be more active. On average, on average, boys are more active. Boys care more about affecting the physical world. They want to build something, knock something down, you know, fight, play fight. And we keep pushing them and pushing them to be more like girls. This has been going on since the 90s. So which would you rather have? Let's go with the therapy. be a motion differentiation route, or let's go with build stuff, do stuff, team, you know, team activities out there in the world. What do you think? Well, I think that's a false dichotomy

that you're creating. I think you do both. And I think that, you know, I just want to push back on that. I think that, forgive me the use of the phrase, but for lack of a better phrase, the toxic masculinity that boys were raised under in the 70s and 80s, where vulnerability The bullying you described. Oh, yeah. Vulnerability was seen as a weakness, kindness, tenderness, compassion. We're seen as maladaptive traits for a young man. The fact that young men tend toward a greater understanding of those qualities, I think, I think is only good.

Now. Wait, is only good. Primarily good, I'll say. Okay. Continue. Yeah, I disagree. I think it's only good that boys become more compassionate, more kind, more tender. And, you know, if it's more feminized, so be it.

That doesn't mean that I think that boys shouldn't be, you know, playing with sticks and playing stickball and building tree forts and, you know, going on, you know, overnight camping expeditions in the mountains. And, you know, I think it's a false dichotomy. You know, I have a teenage son and, you know, I see a lot of positive things about, you know, him and his generation, but I definitely notice some things with him and his friends, especially having to do with resilience. And you and a lot of social scientists and social psychologists are talking about this. It's interesting. I did a post recently about resilience because I was being

interviewed about my book, Soul Boom. And I was talking about spiritual tools for resilience and about how this younger generation has a lack of resilience. And the pushback I got was fierce. Tell me about it. What pushback? Did people disagree? From the younger generation saying, and it was kind of like the lady death protest too much, me thinks.

You know what I mean? Like, were they saying they were resilient? They were saying they were resilient. They were saying we're the most resilient. Oh, because the world is so bad around us. The world is so bad and we've had to deal with so much more than you had to deal with. We're turning on the news and there's doom scrolling

and there's been the invasion of the Capitol and there's the climate crisis. And so we're surviving all that and doing our best and we're actually more resilient. But every spiritual path talks about resilience and frames it in terms of suffering. Yes. And that suffering is a part of the human condition.

That's right. And an acceptance of suffering and not kind of like fearfully pushing suffering away. And in the embrace and wisdom and understanding that suffering is part of, part and parcel with being a human being, then you learn how to navigate it when it comes your way. So as I've been writing about this and getting into the debate since about 2019, I really got involved in the debate. I often heard that, that, well, of course, they're depressed and anxious. Look at the state of the world.

Look how terrible it is. Look what they have to go through. And I would agree that now in the 2020s, you could point to it. You could say, wow, yeah, things are looking really dark. And I just said these apocalyptic things. It wasn't like that in 2012, 2013 when this started. There was nothing so terrible going on, certainly nothing compared to what, you know, I'm a little older than you. But, you know, I grew up in the 70s and we really thought about nuclear war.

I mean, it seemed to me not likely to happen in any particular year, but likely to happen the next 20 or 30 years. And we were close. There were so many, you know, there were a lot of close calls where there were almost false alarms. Environmental catastrophes. Anyway, the point is, every generation grows up with a lot of bad news, a lot of doom saying about the future. We thought there was going to be overpopulation crisis. there would be mass starvation by the year 2000. So I don't buy the argument for a moment

that the world got worse and that's what made Gen Z so depressed precisely in 2013 when Obama had just been re-elect because I should point out, progressives are much more depressed than conservatives and that it used to be they were a little more depressed until 2012.

They're really the ones who get swept away. Also secular kids compared to religious kids. So kids who are anchored firmly in religion or conservative families tended to not get swept away as much as secular kids and progressives. My point is that you can't explain why progressive suddenly got so depressed during Obama's second term when gay marriage was legalized

and everything was going great for progressives. My argument is, it's not the world that gone worse. It's that if you're a middle school kid and you switch from a flip phone to a smartphone, suddenly you are deluge not so much with news. You are deluged with other kids reacting to the kids. the news saying it's an apocalypse. Everything is sexist. Everything is racist. It's thrown kerosene on the fire. It's like, well, yeah, you're putting kids into a fire that they shouldn't be

involved with until they're much older. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't buy that argument for a moment that it's external factor. So anti-fragility is the key concept from my previous book, the codling of the American mind with Greg Lukianov. And that's a term developed by my NYU colleague, Nassim Teleb, the guy who wrote the Black Swan and this great book, Anti-Fragile. And it refers to fact that many things in our world are fragile, and so we have to protect them from breakage. Glass is always fragile. We don't let kids play with glass, you know, wine glasses, things like that. Some things are resilient. You know, wood is more resilient than glass. Plastic is really resilient. We give kids sippy cups. And so we hear the word resilience. We want kids to be resilient

so that, you know, if someone excludes them or insults them, they won't fall to pieces, they'll be able to hold it together. All right, that's a good goal. But what Taleb was saying was, there are some systems that are beyond that. There are some systems that require shocks and setbacks and failures and problems. They require that in order to wire themselves up. There are some systems, like the immune system is the quintessential example. The immune system, we can't be born knowing exactly what germs to fear because germs keep mutating. So we have this amazing evolutionary invention of the immune system, which is open-ended, and it requires exposure to dirt, germs, and parasites, actually, in order to become fully functional.

And that's right. It learns, like, what should I fear, what, and what's okay. And it's precisely because we began protecting kids. We began living more hygienic worlds, keeping kids away from dirt and germs, consumer products, freaking out mothers about, you know, antibacterial this, antibacterial that. For all those things, the immune system, if you overprotect it, you end up with a deformed immune system that overreacted. acts to things that shouldn't, so you get autoimmune diseases and doesn't protect you from other things. The point of all this is that human psychology is generally anti-fragile. If you protect your kids, I mean, yeah, let me ask you, if you could go back and protect your son from no one would

ever insult him, no one would ever exclude him, everything will be, he'll have a good time, there will be no conflicts from the age of zero to the age of 18, and then you'll send him off to college. Would you have chosen that as a father? No. Of course not. And why not? Well, you know, in my religious tradition, the Baha'i faith, Abdul Baha says in one of his clarion calls for raising children is allow children to become accustomed to hardship. Perfect. There you go. That's it.

That's anti-fragility in a nutshell. Yeah. So kids are anti-fragile. In some ways, isn't it crazy, Jonathan? Like I was having this conversation the other day. And we were talking about the benefits of bullying and food. fighting when we were in school. Because when I was in school, it was a rough and tumble, like fishing boat, logger,

plumber, working class Seattle school. There were fist fights in my junior high every week where like blood was splashing on the lockers. I remember seeing janitors washing the blood off the lockers. I wouldn't wish that on anyone and I wouldn't wish like teeth lying on the floor for anyone. But we had to navigate a pretty cruel world where, where, you know, bullies, we're entitled, enabled to kind of punch down on weaker people and nerdy people and stuff like that. And, you know, of course, of course I would take that away.

And at the same time, I do have a certain measure of gratitude for what I went through. That's right. And it was a toughening experience. Generations that live through war, through World War II come out tougher, stronger, more mentally healthy. We certainly don't want World War III to come in order to make. people more healthy. We've had enormous social progress, and progress is good, but sometimes we overcorrect, and sometimes there are problems of progress that are these unanticipated, bad consequences from a good trend. And what can help to illuminate the issue on bullying

is what's called concept creep, that we have an idea of something in psychology, but then it gets reinterpreted so that smaller and smaller things count as bullying. So bullying started, anti-bullying started as like, don't hit people. You don't like, call them derogatory names or racist names, there's going to be consequences if you do that. And that's all well and good, but then it starts to kind of be like, well, you said this and that's bullying.

Exactly. You get down to microaggressions. But the key difference between bullying and normal childhood aggression, you don't want to stamp out childhood aggression, kids have to learn how to deal with aggression, the key distinction is, is it an episode that goes on for minutes or hours

on the one hand, or is it many days? Because you want kids to have conflicts and resolve them, conflicts and resolve them. Kids need to be able to tease each other. You shouldn't knock out all teasing. But the original definition of bullying required a power differential, a potential link to physical force or violence, and repeated over many days. And that completely is bullying. And kids who've gone through that because many kids were bullied for like a whole year or more, that does seem to leave real scars. And those kids, you know, sometimes you do hear them say.

yes, I'm grateful for it because it made me stronger. But you also often hear people, they're clearly still hurt and bitter about it. So, you know, we're all, in the whole psychologically mean, we're all agreed that bullying in that sense, going over many days is bad and we need to stop it. What happened, though, is the zeal with which many administrators and teachers clamped down and bullying meant let's not have any name calling. Let's not have any aggression or hostility. And that's a mistake because kids need to be exposed to aggression and hostility.

Not being punched in the face, but sometimes being called a name. Like, we don't want to stop that. It's as if suddenly as kids born in 1996, the beginning of Gen Z, so let's say when they're turning 14 around the year 2010, it's as if we said to them, do you want to just go to Mars and grow up there? Let's especially look at the younger kids. I suppose you're nine or 10 years. Oh, that's how I open the book.

You have a nine-year-old kid, nine-year-old daughter, and she says, she's signed up for a mission to Mars. You're like, what the hell? Like, what are you talking about? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was chosen for, to go to Mars. There's going to be a Mars colony there. And they want to bring children

because if we go through puberty on Mars and have our growth spurt there, our bones and muscles, everything will be adapted to the low gravity and the radiation. And they think that maybe, you know, it will be better able to, like, be Martian colonists than if you go over it as an adult.

And as a parent, you'd be like, what the hell? Like, what are you even, I mean, this is insane. And then she says, yeah, I don't need your permission. Like they just asked me if I was 13 and I lied and I said I was. And so, yeah, so I'm leaving in a few days. I'm off.

I'm off, yeah. We're all off. We're all going. All of us kids. So that's the bizarreness of what has happened. And of course, if we sent children to Mars, children are more sensitive to radiation than adults because their cells are growing and dividing, which is more a possibility from mutation. there would be very damaged by growing up in a low-gravity environment.

And it's a completely insane thing to do. We would never do it. But basically that's what we did when we said, how about instead of a childhood in which you have friends and you talk to your friends and you play with your friends and you look at people sometimes and we sit at dinner and we talk to it, how about instead of that,

how about I just give you this thing and it moves to the center of your life and all your experience, entertainment, talking to your friends, sexuality, dating everything is going to go through this phone for the rest of your life, starting around age 10. This is basically what we've done. And so I was trying to convey the absurdity and the enormity.

I mean, this is not like, you know, oh, you know, kids are taking up smoking and, you know, 20% of kids are smoking. No, this is, let's radically change childhood for 100% of children other than the Amish. I think proof of this, too, is a lot of parents I've heard about tried and experienced, try to, you know, punish their kids or have a consequence of taking the phones away. That's right. And what happens? And some kids oftentimes have a complete and total breakdown or meltdown or they'll say no. And they'll just be like, I would rather get hit than lose my phone. They will run away and sometimes they'll commit suicide. In fact, it's now recommended because it's sometimes. happens that they commit suicide, that you not use that as a... I haven't heard of that before.

Yeah. So taking away kids' devices as a consequence has led to suicide. To be clear, not just like there was no sign of it, and then you took away the phone that kid killed themselves. These are kids who have already been suicidal or have talked about it already. This can push them over. And so the thing, the reason is, it's clear once you see it, we assume that this reaction that you're talking about is addiction.

He's, oh my God, these kids are so addicted to their phones. You take it away, and they do have withdrawal symptoms. They do have irritability. They have difficulty sleeping. So there is a neurochemical withdrawal. Dopamine circuits are adjusted. If I leave my phone at home, I get those kind of like, I get twitchy, and I reach for it. And I feel when I smoked and I was quitting smoking, I had the same kind of like, where are the cigarettes?

I want to. Good. So those, not good. Sorry. I mean, thank you for backing up my point. Because right, so those are all signs of addictions. That's part of it. But that's not what makes kids commit suicide.

The thing we have to understand about kids in their phones is the entire social world has been reconfigured. It's that if you take away your kid's phone, it's as though you're locking them in a room and saying you cannot communicate with your friends. You are wiped out, cut off. That is a spur of suicide. When people feel alone, isolated. Yeah. So. It's like being in solitude and lock up.

solitary confinement. That's right. We know that, you know, solitary confinement would be incredibly painful even if you had all the physical comforts and taking away your kid's phone when their entire social life has been re-engineered to go through the phone means they're now, they're excluded. Out of the loop, people will talk about them. They don't know what's going on. So, yeah, that's one of the big transformations. And it's inhuman. We evolved, we evolved to really thrive in small groups, a pair of friends. I think, again, I think we, I think we, I think we, to really focus on groups of like three to six, like you're hanging out with your buddies, your gang.

That's really fun. Whereas when girls moved their social lives onto social media, you might say, well, now it's so easy for them. Now they have a group of, you know, 300 girls to hang out with. No. Having lots and lots of shallow connections does not substitute for having two or three good ones. Yeah, it's a fake intimacy. Yeah.

You know, a like or a thumbs up or a heart or something like that. or even a friend or a follower. It's not a friend. It's really not a friend. Because also friends have conflict. Yeah. And then you have to work it through. You can't just delete them.

And friends have issues and you don't love everything about all your friends, but you accept them for their limitations. You know, Grace Jones's slave to the rhythm. I'm a slave to the algorithm. Me, I'm 58 years old. And like on YouTube, the YouTube shorts, which they just basically stole from... They copied TikTok.

But it just knows me so well, and it knows four out of the five videos it sends me, I find extreme delight in. Okay, so tell me more about that. Because I persisted, like I feel like I need to spend some time on TikTok. It's the most important platform for kids. You know, I need to learn much more about it. I need to experience it.

But A, I'm just so busy, especially trying to write this book I haven't put in the time. And B, I am a little afraid of what will happen. So you tell me. It's when you poop. That's when. That fits perfectly the idea. This whole thing is so degrading.

My poops used to be like a four-minute process. Now it's like a 17-minute process. Okay. Tell me what's in your feed that then comes out the other end. No, just tell me what are the kinds of things that you're... As you say, the algorithm knows you. What does it tend to feed you? I mean, everything...

It's insane. It'll be like great stand-up comics. It'll be like a George Carlin routine. It'll be a baby otter growing up in a bathtub. It draws on all of the things I'm interested in. So it's like a Pichinko game. It's going, bling, bling, bling. Tell me about the emotions.

What emotions to just reel off the emotions that you'll tend to, you'll tend to experience during a single poop? Well, poop aside, delight. But then, you know, it moves to a pleasant numbing out. And all of a sudden, 20 minutes has gone or 40 minutes is gone. Time that I used to spend reading a book. And time that I also used to spend in watching a television show. Remember when the boob tube was going to be?

Yeah, it was going to destroy everything. But at least with a television show, even as something as crappy as like the A-Team or Hogan's Heroes, Because you were told a story over a period of time. That's crucial. So you were witnessing a story and characters and people interacting and stuff like that. It wasn't just kind of like a distraction.

Right. Okay, good. So there's so much in what you just said. I just want to comment on. Okay, yeah. Unpack it. So the first is stories are important. We live in stories.

Humans have always been storytellers. We immerse our children in stories. That's great. And so television, right, as I experienced it also, it was that. It was constant stories. And it was on what we now see as a large screen, which you watched with your siblings or your friends. Right. And you'd talk about it.

You'd argue about it. What do we watch next? So watching television was actually somewhat social for most kids. You'd eat while you were watching. It was embodied. So television turns out not to have been particularly bad. It made us more passive. We exercise less.

But it doesn't, you know, we can't say television. television ruined a generation. I mean, people said at the time, and that was a moral panic. So, whereas the small screen now, kids, you get it, you're by yourself. And if your friends are nearby, you're still by yourself. They're watching theirs. You're watching yours. It's not stories. Now, of course, Netflix is. Netflix is great. The stories, the best stories now are so much better than what we had. I tried to show my kids, you know, like lost in space and I dream a genie. And they said, this is so stupid. And they were right. Okay. But at least it was stories that we watched together and they went on for 20 or 40 minutes. Whereas the shorts,

this is the short stuff, TikTok, is really alarming. And so just a couple of things. One, you said you reached a sort of a numbing out phase. Yeah. This is, so this is the exact same as what slot machine addicts say. Slot machine addicts, they're trying to get into that zone. Now, a lot of them have problems in their life, often related to the fact that they're wasting all their money on the slot machine. So now they're in debt and they have all kinds of problems. So one of the best ways they find out of it is to just go to the slot machine so you can zone out. And another point is your feed is entirely positive. Listen to those things. It sounds like, yeah, I would enjoy that too. It doesn't seem degrading. It sounds like your TikTok experience is not degrading. You don't feel

like you're dirty or lowered afterwards, do you? No. Okay. But now look at what kids are watching. Some kids might end up like you. But when I've talked about it with high school and college kids, I mean, maybe it's especially the young guys, but it's like their feet is full of people getting hit by cars, like literally hit by cars, like punched in the face, falling out of windows, horrible, horrible things. Now, it's bad enough, you know, when we watched, you know, say, you know, the godfather, anything else, it's really graphic violence. I mean, I remember those scenes. And then if you're watching 20-second cycles of that over and over and over again. But it's not just the 20-second cycles. It's, you know, a close-up of, you know, Mo Green getting shot

in the eye. I mean, that was horrible. But imagine if it was an actual person being shot in the eye. That is disturbing beyond anything we've ever seen in the movie. And our kids from the age of 10 and 11 are watching this stuff. Real people being killed. So the algorithm is complicated. And for you, it led it in a positive direction that waste your time and numbs you out, but doesn't degrade you directly. A lot of our kids are being brought into a bunch of stuff about sex and violence, cruelty. So, you know, getting back to the subject of spirit. I'm really coming to see that however bad Instagram was, and Instagram I think was the worst single platform for the girls, TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, these are all a new kind of thing,

which has much more power and additional psychological point is when you watch TV, there's no behavior that's being reinforced. Okay, you turn on the TV, you pick a channel, and that's it, that you're done with your behavior for half an hour. Whereas with, even as you, even as you you described it. You, as we're talking here, you were like moving your finger. You swipe, you get a reward. You swipe, you get a reward. Thumbs up better, thumbs down it. Yeah. But the point is, it's constant behavior. And after each behavior, you get a little reward. And the ward is a little bit of dopamine. This is the way you train a rat to do tricks, according to B.F. Skinner in the 1930s. This is the way you train a dog to do tricks. You give them a little tiny reward frequently.

So it's as if, you know, when you think about, for any parent listening, think about how hard it to get your child to sit up straight at the dinner table or to make her bed or to do anything because we don't have the ability, I mean, I guess you could give them little tiny bits of candy every time, but we don't do that. Whereas you give your kid a phone,

and now you've given this corporation, you know, bite dance, you've given them permission to train your child as if they were a dog trainer and your child is a dog. And they can train behaviors, they can train attitudes. And so, you know, you can get an entire generation shifting on whatever political issue, if that's what they're being reinforced for.

So I think what people will look back on this age about. And let's also bring an AI. This is just the dawn of AI. So I think what people look back on is this turning point in human history where there was extraordinary material abundance and prosperity was rising and rising and rising in late 20th century. And then it goes exploding upwards in the early to mid-21st century. So they're going to see this age of material abundance and sociological apocalypse.

That is, it's already a major challenge to have a diverse liberal democracy. How do you keep a group of people together that are not bound together by common blood, common enemies, even common religion? That's a real challenge that the Founding Fathers set out to do. And that's why E. Plurbus Unum is our motto, because that's like magic. It's like literally magic. Let's take many and make them one. So that's always been the American challenge.

Setting aside the slavery and the Native American. No, not setting them aside. Those were the huge. Oh, they seemed to have like conveniently disregarded. Well, but that's many. But that's politics. I mean, Jefferson was very opposed to slavery intellectually, not in his personal life. You know, he was, I mean, I spent a long time at UVA.

And so, of course, we all have to wrestle with Jefferson's legacy and his amazingness. In any case, you know, we've overcome so much. We've gotten so much better. In a sense, we created a liberal democracy in the later 20th century that was beyond anything humans have ever experienced. I mean, obviously, northern European liberal democracies are in many ways more humane. I'm not saying it's just us. But we had this period in which it seemed like things were getting better and better.

Prosperity, rights, women's education, environmental consciousness, especially if you're politically progressive. You'd have to look back at the period, the post-war period all the way up to about 2013, 2014, has decade after decade of amazing progress on all these things. And there were books written about how it's just going to keep getting better. There would be setbacks, and that could end up being true. But I think we're now in a period. We're in a setback, and things are going down in a lot of ways, not materially, but I would say sociologically, but sitting across from you, actually, spiritually. Yes, if we are going down, sociologically spiritually, and what is unknown is how far it's going to go down. It could be that we are in one of

these periods when everything's going to crack, everything's going to break. And actually, we'll talk about that in a moment, I hope, the cyclical theories of history, those I think are really important for this discussion. But, sorry, to make it a little shorter, I think they're going to look back on this period from about 2020 to 2030 or 35 as an enormous turning point in human history. And it could go really, really badly. And it could be that we somehow come out of it and create the greatest societies ever, ever known. Wow. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's quite a clarion call of like, it's like apocalypse or Phoenix from the ashes and, and, uh, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and writing the ship.

That's harrowing, disturbing. And I want to shift gears and talk about some solutions. And there's a spiritual component in all of your work, and it's a thread through all of your work. But I will say, I know the solution, and I've brought this up before. And I don't think you've ever heard this before. Okay, good.

I'm all ears. So here is the solution for, this lost generation that will solve everything. Okay. What is it? Lay on me. Dundgeons and dragons. Okay, explain that.

Dungeons and dragons is the perfect remedy to this anxious generation. Do you play it next to another person or is a virtual person? Of course, next to another person. You sit around a table. You've got a bunch of dice. You create your characters. You're exercising what? Imagination.

And it's co-imagination. and it's co-imagination. Co-imagination. You're a shared imagination. We're all going to imagine that I have a half-elf magic user named Del Flax. And then we're going to go on an adventure together.

There's a dungeon master. And then we have to work together. And we have different ideas about like, hey, there's a copper dragon in there with three trunks of treasure. How are we going to kill it? It's like, let's rush in. Like, no, dummy, that won't work.

I'm going to set this spell and you guys do it. Okay, it's imagination, it's cooperation. It's hours at the table. It's sharing snacks and laughter in the way because someone farts and then derails the whole thing. And then you take a break and then you watch, you know. I dream of genie or whatever it is. But Dungeons and Dragons.

Okay. I will totally go with that as an example of play that would be great. It's not nearly sufficient as play, but it's a, kind of play. So let me tell you a few things that, a few other things we need. We just, so the latest data says American kids are spending an average of five hours a day just on social media, just on social media. Wow. That's especially, it's especially the videos. It's especially YouTube, both the shorts and the long videos, and TikTok and Instagram are the big, are the big ones. Five hours

a day. So that's 35 hours a week just on social media. And then you add in the estimates are anywhere from eight to ten hours a day is the total on their, on their, on their devices on their phone especially, but also on video games. So 10 hours a day, that pushes out almost everything. And this is the point of chapter five of the book is when you're doing 10 hours a day on your screen, imagine that 10 hours a day taken out of your life, it reduces sleep, it reduces time with friends, it reduces your ability to focus because of the constant interruptions. Time outdoors, time outdoors.

Yep. Exercise everything. So the opportunity costs, what you give up from 10 hours a day is gigantic. And that would be 10 hours a day to anything. If people were spending 10 hours a day juggling popcorn, that would really be a suck from their quality of life, let alone something. Yeah, now 10 hours a day doing sports, that I think would not be nearly as bad to be exhausting. But anyway, my point is, there are multiple kinds of experiences kids need.

And your description of Dungeons and Dragons gives us probably this half of them. Like, it really is great. It sounds to me like that is possibly the best game I could think of. and if kids would take three hours a day out of TikTok and put it towards Dungeons and Dragons, I think we would see, we would literally see an improvement in mental health. But there's more we need.

In doing research for this book, I really went deep into the research on play, and there's some really cool findings about play. So one of the interesting things about play, first, all mammals do it, all baby mammals do it. Mammals need to do it in order to wire up the brains. It's part of our programming. If you deprive recess monkeys or even rats,

deprive them of play. They don't become confident, exploratory. They become basically look anxious. And how do you describe play? Well, you're like, okay, I'll just say it right now. Rain, you're back in third, fourth grade. It's after school. You're playing.

What do you see? Running around chaos, kind of, some kind of game organized, like a hide-and-seek or something. with a ball, but then it, you know, kind of falls aside and then just hanging out and sometimes some boredom and sitting around. That's right. How many adults are there in your imagination?

How many adults are no adults around? That's what they're none. None adults. Right. And how many screens are around? None screens. Right. Yeah.

So this is what you find. This is what play used to be from, you know, five million BC or whenever you want to talk about the dawn of humanity. Yeah. Until, you know, sometime in the 1990. 90s or early 2000s. This is normal, healthy human childhood. What we were all cooperating, what we were all learning in doing that was how do we get along with others? How do we agree on what we're going to do? Somebody, did they cheat? He cheated. Wait, no, you know, you didn't,

you know, and then you have to all, you have to litigate it. That's really important. Someone stops off. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so you lose their temper, like, you were cheating, that's right. So you have to resolve the conflict because everyone wants the game to keep going. So everyone is motivated to resolve the conflict and they'll put pressure on the guy who's holding out. Like, come on, let's get back to the game. So you're learning all these skills that are essential for democracy.

How do we become self-governing? That's what the American experiment is. When the founding fathers talked about this as a great experiment, the experiment was, can we govern ourselves without a king? And the Europeans said, no, you're going to fail. There's no way you can govern yourself without a king. And we said, well, we're going to give it a try.

Well, we're about to elect a king in a few months. Well, that's right. That's fine. That's right. problem is that we're losing the ability to become self-governing, and the known flaws, the known problems of democracy, known since ancient Greece, are our tendency to have a demagogue, appeal to our emotions, to have mob violence. This is what democracy is prone to. One, and so, just to get back to play, several commentators have pointed out that free play

of the, exactly the sort you described, is preparation for democratic citizenship. Oh, interesting. Now, there's two things about it. One is resolving the conflicts. Imagine boys playing video games for five hours a day. There are no conflicts. There can't be. The game has worked out all the rules.

Nobody can cheat. So you remove the most nutritious part of children's play, which is the conflicts, the conflict resolution. Can't have that on video games. That's one thing you remove. The other thing you remove is actual fear. Sometimes when we were playing, we were actually afraid. I mean, you'd climb, because, you know, my friend, we'd climb up trees and, like, you get really high.

And then you get stuck. And then you really, yeah, you get stuck. Yeah. That's right. You know, or, you know, I mean, we almost, we did almost no shoplifting, fortunately. But, like, we, you know, we stole shopping carts and then we would bash off the top of them to make like a, like a, you know, a roll thing that you could roll down hill. You could ride on down hills. It was really exciting.

But there's, you can get hurt. And we did, you know, you did sometimes get hurt. People got, kids got hurt all the time. They were showing up with casts. Yes. What happened? Oh, I jumped off the roof and fell on my thoughts. That's right. And so now, you know, it sounds stupid, but it turns out that's actually necessary. Kids have to take risks. They have to get hurt. And I did read an article recently about young men no longer going to the emergency room. That's right. Can you tell us about that? That's one of the most surprising graphs in my book. My book has a, you know, the anxious generation is full of graphs about how everything changed. I love graphs. So we've got a bunch of graphs about what kids say about risk taking. Like one of the questions on this.

this large national survey is, you know, sometimes I enjoy doing things, I enjoy doing things that are a little dangerous. There's some questions about risk-taking. And you see that those drop pretty sharply in the 2010s because kids, because Gen Z comes in, they're much more anxious, they don't like risk. Okay, but that's what they say. What do they do? It turns out the CDC collects data on hospitalizations.

What are all the reasons people are going to hospitals? Because they need to track that. If there's a big increase in something, they don't need to. pick it up. One of the things they track is broken bones. Are you going in for a fracture-related injury, you know, an accident, you broke a bone? And when you break up the data by age, Zach Rauch, my research partner, he and I did this, you break up the data by age and gender. What you see is that there's one outlier group, young men. Young men, they have far more broken bones than anyone else until about 2012. Then what happens? Their rates of broken bones plummet, and they plummet so fast

that by 2019, 2020, they are no more likely to have a broken bone than a 50-year-old man. They are no more likely to have a broken bone than teenage girls were 15 years ago. An indicator that they're not engaging in risky behaviors. That's right. All they do is they're physically dangerous behaviors. Exactly. They're not doing anything with physical risk. No more bicycles, which means no more bicycle ramps, right?

Didn't you, sometimes you ride your bicycle over a ramp, you try to control it in the air? You ride it over your sister. You know, your sister would lie under the ramp. That's disgusting and awful, and I really resent that you did that. It was the 70s is what we did. But again, the point is... Now, you're so canceled right now. Jonathan Haidt used to ride a bicycle over his sister.

Well, there was a jumper. Canceled. You know, she wasn't... I got that. I get that. I get that. Anyway, my point is, Dungeons and Dragons is great, but as long as they also have some...

truly physically dangerous, risky, thrilling outdoor play. And I don't mean, you know, I don't mean things that could kill you, but things that could hurt you. I have the solution. Okay, what? Real Dungeons and Dragons, with actual dragons. No, what? Well, close.

Okay. Close. Dungeons and Dragons. Mm-hmm. Live action role-playing. It's called LARPing. Okay. That's where you dress up like the characters and you go out in the woods with broadswords made

out of foam or sticks or something, and you bash on each other and you actually are, we used to do this, you act out. And there's big communities that do live action role playing. So there you go.

There you go. Combine it all. Okay. I think so. I think I'd add, you know, the few times I played paintball, I played paintball

and laser tag with my buddies and they're both really fun. The good thing about paintball is that it actually hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts.

No, not way too much. It does. I was covered in bruises. But that's part of what makes it so exciting. is you really don't want to get shot. Whereas with laser tag, it's not that big a deal. Like, alright, I'm out.

No, no, no, no. So, anyway, my point is just that. Laser tag with actual lasers. How about larping with sticks rather than foam things? Because they need to have, there needs to be a little risk of pain. Yeah, yeah. Got it. Let's turn our attention to the spiritual solutions that you're talking about.

We've kind of, we've identified the spiritual disease in a sense. And I want to say this, Jonathan. I believe for many of my atheists' friends, I would say that humans are wired for transcendence, and they are wired to long for something higher than themselves, something outside of themselves. It just depends on what you put in that place. It can be just your family. It can be democracy. It can be workaholism.

It can be making money. It can be – there's so many things that one can put in the process. place of quote unquote a god and what you're describing i think is like this the social dynamic that's created by the prevalence of screens 10 hours a day in one's life then becomes the higher power to a generation that just de facto because it sucks up all the oxygen has become this this higher power so how do we um find some kind of spiritual substance for the vast and myriad world of an online iPhone generation. So I think what you've described is that people often have a highest goal,

and they can swap almost anything in there to pursue as their highest goal. But what I'd like to do to add on to what you said is bringing what I learned from Emil Dirkheim in the study of sociology and the study of religion. So I'm a Jewish atheist. I was raised Jewish. I'm ethnically, culturally Jewish, but I never really believed in God. And for a while, I was anti-religion. I thought religion is stupid and the Bible is obviously not true and all that stuff.

But in studying morality and the evolution of morality, how did humans come to have these moral communities? The story I told in my book, The Righteous Mind, was that we, as we began to do more group versus group conflict over territory, You know, chimpanzees do this. It's brutal. It has tremendous implications for evolution and survival. The human groups that could bind themselves together around something sacred could trust each other. They were much more effective, and they basically wiped out those that weren't. So I think we had a long period, hundreds of thousands of years.

Wipeed out those who weren't sometimes by the sword, but sometimes through integration and cooperation by incorporating those groups. Yeah, that's true. It could be. For early groups, I think it was more common that just, you know, if a more powerful cohesive groups takes over, they take over the river basin, they've got water, you're pushed to the fringes, your group dies out. So I don't think it was mostly killing. But I think it was just winning the competition for resources and territory, the more cohesive

groups won. And that's why we get the rise of civilization. You almost always, you always, except with possible exception. Again, I'm starting to push back. In my understanding, that is a very common kind of old school way of the way of the way of the of looking at human development. Okay. What do you think is new?

What is new is looking at the possibility that humans that controlled the river basin became good at communication, became good at trade, became good at accepting differences, and would often welcome other tribes into the fold and not push people that were different, oh, you have to go to that dry creek bed and go die off, but welcome them into the fold and cruise kind of more thriving civilizations that weren't, it wasn't in a way, it's not just survival of the fittest. It's not like, oh, a belief in some kind of higher power or transcendence allowed us to create a group that then we're going to, like, bully our way to the top and we're going to,

and we're going to survive in your knowledge. Okay. But I think you're talking about a later stage in civilization where you get multi-ethnic empires and sometimes they were cooperating. You're talking about like cavemen days. Oh, yeah. Straight back. 100,000 years ago.

Like Hidalbergensis, 800,000 D.C. I get that. Through early Homo sapiens. But when you get the breakthrough to civilization, when you get agriculture, when you get villages, you almost always get, you get, like, ziggurats, you get temples, you get religious things first. And so my argument in the book, at least, is that we evolve this ability to make things sacred. And it tends to be, you know, it's often it's a tree, it's a river, it's a person, it's a certain kind of rock, but it serves the function of letting us circle around it. And we who, you know,

our ancestors came from this river or from, you know, the god who came, whatever. There's a story told that unites us. And so shared sacredness is, I think, part of our evolutionary design. Lots of small gods, lots of little sprites and deities. Later on, you get big gods, you get monotheism, sprites and deities. Dungeons and dragons, I imagine they're all over the place there. So once you understand the psychology of sacredness, then I would say, no, you can't just swap in work or family. It has to be something larger. It could be the nation.

Nation works very well with very deleterious results. That's where you get the really bad kind of nationalism. Toxic nationalism. Yeah. And which leads to militarism. That's right. That's right. So there are certain things when you harness our religiosity, it can be done for good or it can

be done to create an incredibly powerful, incredibly pernicious force. I don't know whether Genghis Khan was religious, but he and his, you know, they were very, very effective at wiping people out, killing the men, taking the women. So, so. And also the pernicious force of materialism and kind of rampant consumerism being that, that ziggurat. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So since here we are talking about, especially chapter eight in my book, which is titled spiritual elevation and degradation, what we're trying to do here is look at the ways that when our lives moved online onto phones, did that move us in the way that the ancients advise us to be? Like, what is so spiritual growth?

So, of course, in Soul Boom, you're writing about spiritual progress and even like secular story, like the Kung Fu, you know, the secular spiritual. So what would you say are the major ways that a modern person can pursue spiritual growth. And then for each one, let's see whether kids with a phone-based life are going to be helped to do that. Or hindered.

Great question. So what's your list? Number one, contemplation. There you go. Contemplation. So that would be a phoneless experience of quieting the mind and being receptive to whatever.

One could call it the subconscious. One could call it the muse. That's how God comes through. Yes. So that's number one. Okay, so we're 0 for one on the phone-based life. Prayer. So some kind of beseeching to, it can be the Dharma and the natural beauty of the universe.

It can be to God. It can be to Jesus. It can be to the beauty of nature, Gaia, the great spirit, but some kind of beseeching connection to some power greater than ourselves. Okay. So could a phone-based life help that? I have no idea here. Would you say that a young person putting out her question to, you know, her Instagram followers or whatever? Probably not.

But I will say there's an increase in all these apps of meditation apps and waking up app by Sam Harris. Wakingup.com slash soul boom. And you can get your first month for free. Check it out. So there are more resources because of the phone. There's meditations. There's podcasts on wellness. So actually, right.

So our score here is actually very different than what I said. So contemplation, in general, no, but there are apps that can help you be contemplative, granted. So maybe, maybe, keep going. What's your next? What does one do for spiritual progress? I would say reading the great spiritual wisdom traditions of the world. And that can be the Bible or the Quran. It could be the writings of the Buddha.

It could be, there's great philosophers. Something that really struck me is that many traditions, Buddhists, and especially the Stoics, it's like reading in the mornings, like that is a, that is literally like one of the major spiritual practices, is immersing yourselves in the great ideas that can guide you and keep you. And they use your metaphor, like above and below, like it can be above the muck. Like Marcus Aurelius talks about the muck that we get stuck in. Sure.

So, so the phone-based life, Gen Z, I just saw some results on. There have been, for many decades, tracked kids reading. How many books do you read just for pleasure or not because you're assigned in school? And that's been going down since the 80s or 90s. You know, as there's this more television, cable, internet. So that's been going down steadily, but it goes down faster in the 2010s. And the number of young people who've read zero books in the last year is rising very rapidly now. Oh, man.

So I think your speculation is probably right that in theory you could have everything on your phone. That would be great. But in practice, because you have thousands of things, you need to do every day. You just don't take the time. You don't take the half hour, hour to read a test. I'll rattle off a bunch of other spiritual practice. Connection with nature as one.

Devastated. A phone-based life definitely takes you away from that. Finding a sacred in your life, something that's personally sacred to you. I can't imagine a phone doing that. I would say that a like-minded community, and that doesn't necessarily mean. in a church, a like-minded community of like people that want to gather and connect around something that you feel called to connect around.

It could be a yoga class or meditation group or something like that. There it's going to the phone place life could really help. That could help. There could be a Reddit subgroup or a Instagram page that you follow and and connect with. I mean, that's what we're trying to build on Soul Boom and we have an Instagram page, but we try and make it interactive and loving. and bringing people together. Make sure to like, follow, and subscribe.

That's Instagram.com slash soul boom. And finally, you know, the most important aspect of a spiritual life is leaving the ego behind. Yeah. Well, I'd say transcending, just leaving it behind. Okay, transcending the ego in service to others.

Yes. Oh, that is a great list. In fact, I wish I'd written it down or I'll get it from you later. I'll send you a link to the podcast you can listen to it. Perfect, perfect. So I think what that points out is the original purpose of social media, you know, early Facebook, all that, it was to link together groups of people around a common interest. You know, I think that's what Tumblr especially was doing. And so I totally will grant that social media in theory and perhaps in practice really is an amazing way to bring people together.

It connects. It does. It is the Zuckerberg, you know, it was only connect, but connect for what? So it could definitely help form communities. That's an important point that I should acknowledge more often. But then the nature of the way they're managed is such that either you can get the best out of them or not. In chapter 8, the spirituality chapter, I have a whole section on self-transcendence. I did some research on the emotion of awe with my friend Dachra Keltonner at Berkeley. And awe is, I'm an awe junkie.

Aw is my favorite emotion. And to the extent that I have a spiritual life, it's been from awe experiences in nature. and with psychedelics, those are the main things that really just like open my heart and mind. Aw. Aw. Get it. Yeah, I got it. I see what you did there.

But my point is that we are sort of quickly, very easily able to focus in on my needs, my wants, competition that the airplane scene you just talked about. And it takes more doing, more time to go the other way. And what Dachra points out in his wonderful book, Aw, he goes through. the neurobiology of this. There's the default mode network. There's this neural systems that are kind of really always on when we're thinking about ourselves and our needs. And when people are meditating, and I think there's some hints that when they're on psychedelic drugs, this default mode network kind of quiets down. It kind of is less active. And so we really do lose self-consciousness. We become less self-conscious. We're more open to love, to people, to God. So in all these ways,

Now there, I think, you know, I think a life with a phone in your pocket makes that very hard. Life on social media is about self-presentation, posing, trying to impress people. So I think if we keep self-transcendence at the center of spiritual progress, a person who is spiritually advanced is one who is closer to that, is less often thinking about themselves and their needs. Instead of self-centered, other-centered. Yeah, that's right, other-centered. So I can imagine, in theory, a phone-based life could make some people more other-centered,

but I think in practice it doesn't work that way. So what solutions do you offer, especially around this chapter on spirituality? The first thing is to save the next generation from this fate. And so kids who are now in elementary school or don't yet, aren't yet living their lives. Schools and school districts having... They have enormous power to change their... Strictures on cell phone usage. That's right.

So what I propose in the book is for norm. that will break up four collective action problems. So the first is no smartphone till high school. No middle school kid should have a smartphone. Just give them a flip phone. You heard it here, folks. Rule number two, no social media till 16. These platforms are designed for adults.

They're devastating to kids. The benefits to children are minuscule. The harms are massive. So no social media till 16. The third is phone-free schools. Schools need to lock up the phones in the morning in a phone locker or yonder pouch. it's not enough to say, oh, well, you know, you're not allowed to take it out during class.

You have to keep it in your pocket or hide it in a book. I mean, that just doesn't work. Yeah. So phone-free schools. And the fourth is far more free play, independence, and responsibility in the real world. Going back to a more free-range childhood, and here I'm drawing on my friend Lenore Skenezy, who helped me write some of the later chapters in the book. So those are the four that I propose to really, to roll back the phone-based childhood

for young people and at least delay it. Okay. But now your question was, well, what about us adults? You know, we're not going to, we're well over 14, but, you know, we're not going to have phone-free offices. So what can we do? I'm including here everything about our electronic lives. So for me, I'm always at a computer. So my phone isn't a problem for me because I don't use it that much. I'm almost always at a computer. And then I get notifications. I'm distracted. I choose to go check something out instead of doing the hard work of thinking through a problem. So what can we do as adults?

And I think the first is we have to really recognize what this is doing to us. And so the conversation you and I just had, which I think was remarkably nuanced about, you know, it's not all bad. The phones, they can do some things for us, but to really understand what they're doing to us on net and to resolve, just as you would try to improve your physical health, yeah, let's say you resolve to improve your spiritual health vis-a-vis or with regard to your digital life. That's the first thing.

Just understand it. The other thing, as I mentioned before, about my students, is you must get control of your morning routine and your evening routine. You have to recharge your brain, your mind. You must get a good night's sleep. One of my great regrets about my life is that I didn't prioritize sleep. And I think, you know, I'm 60. My memory has been declining in, you know, the normal age-related ways. But I do have a sense that had I, because I've gotten very little sleep in my life, I didn't feel I needed it, you know, five hours, five to six hours of what I usually get, and now it's less.

But I wish I'd prioritize it because I think it would have preserved me more. Charging your phone not next to your bad, but in another room is... Well, it depends. So for me, the phone is actually helpful because I find if I read with it on a dark screen, if I read, that really makes me sleep within 10 minutes.

So for me, my phone actually helps me get to sleep. But that's because I'm not checking notifications. Whereas my students, this was really shocking to me. When we go through, I have them list out, like, you know, what are the, you know, countdown. What are the five things you do before going to bed? Five, four, three, two, one. Zero is you close your eyes. What's five, four, three, two, one. For almost everybody, one was check my notifications and texts, and then close my eyes. And then in the morning, let's count up. Zero is

you open your eyes. What's one? Same thing. So, so that is just a recipe for being fractured, disoriented, non-self transcending. So for adults, recognize the problem, figure out how these digital tools are useful to you because we do need them as tools. And then almost everything else is going to be, at best, just a waste of time. And at worst, something that really just fragments you and depresses you or make anxiety more than depression. So yeah, those would be my starting pieces of advice for adults. So the norms can change very fast when people don't like a system and they then see a way out. When you have people just kept in place by fear, in this case fear of missing out. If that's the main fear that's keeping people on, if we show them a way out,

then actually can change very, very quickly. Isn't that such a primal human need? That's right. To belong. I want to be a part of. That's what we're terrified of being alone. That's right. And yet that drive, that fear of being alone is making us more alone. Exactly. That's how the platforms hijacked the fears and concerns and needs of teenagers, lured them away from each other and onto their platforms, and that's the great rewiring of childhood that happened between 2010 and 2015, and that's the major cause. There are others, but the major cause of the teen mental health crisis, which is happening, not just in America, but in all the advanced democracies, certainly all the English-speaking countries, the Scandinavian countries, we've documented that

on my substack. Oh, I should say, as we're wrapping up here, you can go much deeper into the research. If you go to afterbabel.com is my substack with Zach Roush. We lay out all of our research. We have amazing graphs, we look internationally. And we have this beautiful new web page at anxious generation.com, which includes an art project, this amazing art project by my friend Dave Cicerelli, the artist who designed the cover. He created a 10-foot-tall milk carton with an image of a missing child on it, but it says missing childhood. If anyone interested, if you go to anxious generation.com. Wonderful. Wonderful. And just before we close, I just want to get some. something from my, here we go, just from my Instagram.

Here we go. Okay. Thanks, Jonathan. Thanks for coming by. Rain, what a pleasure. And thanks for your work. Thanks for exploring these issues, mental health and spirituality. These are the issues of our time. I hope you'll come back to the Soul Boom Kitchen

and we'll continue the conversation on ever further solutions for a floundering generation. I'd love to. Thank you, Ray. Thanks. The Soul Boom podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.