The Boyscast with Ryan Long - JONATHAN HAIDT on Declining Masculinity, Smartphones Ruining The World & Academia Going Nuts

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Dr Jonathan Haidt joins the fellas to discuss why social media is bad for kids, college campus protests from a professor’s POV, and 3 bad ideas to guarantee a terrible life. SUPPORT THE BOYS PATREON.COM/THEBOYSCAST  SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! AG1 - Go to http://drinkag1.com/boyscast to get $20 off your order, and a free 1-year supply of vitamin D plus 5 AG1 travel packs RYAN ON TOUR:  Auckland NZ: July 24, SYDNEY: July 25, Melbourne July 27, Brisbane: July 31, Perth: Aug 1,  ryanlongcomedy.com DANNY ON TOUR: Minneapolis, MN May 30 - Jun 2 Edmonton, AB  July 25 - 28, Vancouver, BC Aug 8 - Aug 11 SUPPORT THE BOYSCAST:  https://www.patreon.com/theboyscast http://ryanlongcomedy.com Ryan @ryanlongcomedy Danny @dannyjokes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld's commencement speech at Duke University was recently drowned out by free Palestine chants, and according to those in attendance, the sitcom star grabbed the mic and began aggressively shouting at the audience to shut up before a frantic Michael Richards ran onto the side of the stage screaming, Jerry, don't do it. It's not worth it. Eyewitness accounts say Seinfeld turned to Richards to say, You stay out of this, Michael. This is between me and the protesters, and began screaming, You can talk, you're all of this, Michael. This is between me and the protesters and began screaming, you can talk, you're all brave-ass motherfuckers,

before turning to Richards to say, it's going down and you can't stop me. At this point, Richards got down on his knees, pleading, Jerry, it's too late for me, but you don't have to make the same mistakes that I did. I know it will feel good. God damn it, I know it feels good. But if you yell that word,

you can kiss the income streams you love so much goodbye while inching closer to the center of the stage. At this point, Jerry screamed, You stay back, Richards. Actually, wait. What word do you think I'm about to say? But before he could answer, Richards slipped on the stage

and in reaching for the curtain, managed to cause the entire stage dressing to come toppling down. And as the crowd erupted in laughter, Seinfeld grabbed the mic and finished his set by saying, ouch, that's gotta hurt. The Boys Cast. We are talking about the anxious generation. This is a big episode for us and how is the voice doing right now ah yeah so so i um i can speak um in december i lost my voice entirely i couldn't speak at all it was extremely frightening and that was around when you

reached out to me and then i found this whole world of people like you who've been through this it is because you never think about losing your voice. You know, we can all understand breaking our leg or getting Alzheimer's. But you never think about losing your voice. And then, you know, it's like, I would have to do things on the phone and people couldn't hear me. You know, it was like, you realize just how cut off you are if you don't have a voice. So anyway, long story short, I lost my voice, went to an amazing doctor, he ended up injecting first saline solution into my vocal cords because the problem was they weren't closing that made them fatter that worked so then they he injected uh hyaluronic acid which is the sort of thing that women put in their faces to erase

wrinkles i never yeah i never heard about all that stuff okay it feels like new because mine's like 10 years ago and it never came back years or is it? Do you have to keep watching it? Well, yeah, but the truth is, for me specifically, it was more just like what I needed to do was not sleep two hours, party every night, yell and scream over music until 5 a.m. You lose it easy now, though. Well, I've always lost it easy, yeah. But that's because I speak too loud. And then also certain people, when you have scratchier voices,

I feel like everyone I know who has a scratchy voice has to get voice surgery at some point. I just went to a social distortion concert. Mike Ness, I hear, had throat cancer and somehow kept his voice. He was great. Yeah, because it's your, well, that's the thing. Your vocal cords, this is what I'm always arguing with people

because they're always like, oh, take T's your, well that's the thing Your vocal cords, this is what I'm always arguing with people Because they're always like, oh take teas and all this stuff And you're like, your vocal cords Aren't in the throat that you drink through So if you've got cancer in that throat It's like that's not where your vocal cords are Yeah, that's right, I just want to use my one Hopefully funny analogy Because none of us understand how that all works down there

But once you see the models of it You realize the larynx that whole part of your throat it's like it's like a swiss watch made out of meat i mean it's just like it's amazing what it's able to accomplish so quickly and you don't even know how it works but yeah it can go wrong dude it kind of looks like a vagina yes you're right the image is on the scope oh yeah they are weirdly sexual yeah okay so what is what are what have college campuses been like in the last two years? Are things calmer down now or what? Well, you know, so I've been in this game since 2015 when Greg Lukianoff and I wrote an article in The Atlantic called The Coddling of the American Mind.

And that was right at the start of students having a new kind of activism, very aggressive, very demanding that other people not say things, not write things, not come to campus because it'll harm us, it'll be violent. So it was a very new way of thinking in 2015. Around that time, coincidentally, I co-founded Heterodox Academy, an organization now of 6,000 professors who think that we actually need viewpoint diversity in universities. We need to be able to speak freely. We need to be able to challenge each other. And every year since then, things have gotten worse on campus. Every year, there's never been a turnaround. I kept waiting for the pendulum to swing. I kept waiting for some college presidents to find some spine and say, you know what? We have an academic mission here, and we're going to do it. And so every year has

gotten worse and worse since 2015. Until 2023, there was some turnaround. In 2023, we finally saw a few college presidents saying, you know know what you don't get to just shout down whatever speakers you don't like there will be consequences and that didn't happen hardly at all from 2015 to 2023 so we what are the consequences oh that you might actually get a slap on the wrist and it might even be a hard slap on the wrist i don't know if anyone's been actually expelled we could just go walk around bullying everyone um there you know i need to read up on what the consequences were, whether they're, but at least, you know, like at Stanford, I mean, they shouted down a conservative judge at

the law school, and a member of the staff, who was, I think, in the DEI department, she was there with a speech prepared, supporting the students and shouting down this federal judge. So it's an incredibly shameful thing to happen at an elite law school. But the dean of the law school actually wrote a beautiful letter saying, no, actually, no, this is wrong. I don't remember if there were consequences, but at least she said it was wrong. I mean, that's progress. So things were beginning to get better. And then October 7th happens and just unleashes the furies. And my own building, so the encampment stuff at NYU, it's actually at my own building at NYU Stern.

It's in the courtyard. Where you live? Where I work. Okay, okay. Yeah. So I have to go through extra security to get into my building now. There's plywood fencing all around. It feels like you're just wading through protests. Are you like, do they know you?

And they're like, they kind of know that you're kind of like. So fortunately, I was away in the UK when they were encamped. And then our president, like many presidents, they tried to deal with them, tried to negotiate. But this is one of those examples. You don't get to shut down the university. You don't get to stop people from going to class. You don't get to shut down graduation and ruin it for everyone just because you want

to politically protest. By all means, protest. Hold up signs. Make your arguments. But once you get into intimidation, and Jewish students, I'm Jewish, I hear Jewish students all around the country are really feeling intimidated on campus. Of course, most of the protests are peaceful. But if you're walking by a protest with a yarmulke, you don't care if most of it is peaceful, you care if 100% of it is.

And so, harassment, occasional physical violence against Jews, anyway. You know, I'd prefer not to get too deeply into this. Pete Yeah, how does that square up with the idea that, because, I mean, the kind of premise of your new book is that things are kind of almost too safe in real life and then not safe enough on the internet, especially for kids, right? That's right. So it's like when you're saying 100% safe. Oh, I'm sorry. I mean, when I say safe, I mean physically safe.

Yeah, physically safe. Safety means physical. I don't ever say emotionally safe. That is a terrible concept to spread. But these protesters were very much of like i don't know if you coined the term safetyism yeah but you know they were essentially ascribed to that ideology where you know everybody should feel safe all the time from words essentially and then now they're doing all this stuff and people are like we don't feel safe and even if they're

not actually unsafe they're saying well we don't feel safe so shouldn that, or they're just hypocritical and don't care. Pete So, there was a quote from a student at Harvard, it was a quote in the Harvard Crimson, if Harvard cares so damn much about my mental health, why don't they just divest from Israel? You know, it's this idea that I'm suffering, I'm quaking, they'll talk about their own emotions as a reason why someone else has to do something. So, that's the dynamic. It wasn't there in 2012, but that became common around 2015. And so this can lead us into the new book,

because one of the connections is that the students who were on campus in 2012 were millennials. Millennials were born 1981 to 1995, and they did not get Facebook until college, and they did not probably have a smartphone until college. So they went through puberty before the smartphone social media era. That's us, yeah. Whereas, right, so your mental health is on average fine. You guys are creative, you travel the world, you take chances, you yell and scream and risk your vocal cords. You have what's recognizably a youth. Whereas Gen Z, born 1996 and later, many of them got their first smartphone. Let's see, they were 96, so you were 11 when the iPhone

came out. You probably got one around the age of 13 or 14. You got Instagram when you were 13, 14. And you went through puberty on social media. And that's why I believe we can get into the mechanisms. That's the dividing line. If you went through puberty on smartphones and social media, instead of yelling and screaming and running around with your friends, you have much worse mental health on average. Yeah.

One of the scariest things is when i see people with kids right now and all the kids are on ipads because it clearly works yeah like that is seems like an amazing solution you're like your kids freaking out and you know i have like xanax would do the same thing right yeah of course of course but like i have you know it seems you know obviously not not as extreme as that but like my niece or whatever when she was younger they're like she's having tons of energy freaking out and you need her to be calm and just go here's an ipad so it seems like such a good short-term solution but then obviously you got to pay the piper at some point that's right so there's two reasons that i mean you know what i'm arguing in the book

is that uh we have an epidemic of mental illness which was caused by the loss of the play-based childhood which is what humans have always had because all mammals have to play, replaced by the phone-based childhood, which is you grow up largely with a phone in your hand, largely on screens, always thinking about the virtual world, not the people near you. And so that's, in a nutshell, that's what I argue in the book. And the reason why we let this happen is two things. One is, as you said, we give the kid the iPad, and they're happy, and they're calm, and our life is easier, and I can do my email, I can talk with my friends, I can cook, do whatever it is. So we adults found there were huge benefits to us personally from giving the kid a screen. And the other thing is, back in 2012, which is the turning point, back in 2012,

most of us were techno-optim looked around the world we saw like because you know most of us i mean you're maybe too well do you remember your first encounter with the internet when you first saw a web browser facebook came out when we were in college yeah no i remember i remember specifically it was like 95 probably like 94 95 we had uh yeah yeah icq oh i don't know that icq i don't even think at that point it was uh what is that pentium 486 that my mom got which was like the craziest computer at the time okay yeah right but so you guys you were kids when web browsers came out and you maybe you didn't have the experience that the rest that older people had which is you know in myths there is

the possibility of omniscience and, you know, God will grant you omniscience. Well, your first exposure to AltaVista or whatever web browser is, wait, you mean I just type in something and I get the answer within one second, like anything? You know, I can find every, it was amazing. And we really thought this is the greatest thing ever to happen. And in some ways the internet is. But we didn't see the dark sides back then it was magical and so and so the older millennials what year were you guys born 85 what 85 83 and 83 okay you're you're older millennial you're sort of mid-millennial um so the older millennials really took to it they were online a lot but you had to be on uh your parents computer it was probably not your computer it was the home

the home computer yeah out in the living room of the kitchen yeah you have to do you remember when you had to put the phone in the sock of course no i remember the dial like you know dial up and if you it was then your mother says i need the phone i need the phone get off the computer yeah get off the computer and also it wasn't even though you had everything, or I wouldn't say everything available to you, but you had this new world, it was still so slow. I remember the first time that they introduced cable internet. At the mall, there was a demo, and I specifically remember this. There was a demo computer, and going to click a website, and seeing a website just load instantly. And I remember, I was like, wow.

Because remember, it used to go like this yeah that's right that's right how to refresh yeah to refresh it was like this slow just to load a site but the speed is actually a very very important psychological variable so let me just reel into this because this is something that doesn't get talked about much um so in behaviorism in the school of psychology where they studied you know in the 20s and 30s bf skinner how do you train an animal to do tricks? How do you train a person? And what was discovered was that you can get whatever behavior you want if you give the animal small, tiny little rewards very quickly. If you give them a large reward at a delay of five or ten seconds, you don't get very much. If you're trying to train a dog, you can't say, you know, if know i'm trying to train our puppy now you know if you pee outside i'll give you a steak

when we get upstairs like you know that they can't possibly learn from that but if it's you know but if it's just a few seconds then you get learning and if it's a tenth of a second you get a lot more yeah and so slow internet was not so addictive and even today i tell parents you know it's not that i'm saying cut your kid off from the internet. I'm just saying don't give them a smartphone, which is the entire internet in their pocket. Whenever they want, they'll use it on the bus, they'll use it at school, they'll use it during class, they'll use it all the time, they'll use it in bed. Don't do that. But a laptop, at least you have to like move the cursor, click, and then the page loads. And that can take, you know, two seconds.

A two-second delay is much healthier for your kid than a 0.01-second delay. So it's the touchscreens that are so addictive. Yeah, I mean, famously, Steve Jobs said he's like, he's at his house. There's no iPads, none of that stuff. That's right. Now, this is a really important point. I hope everybody, you know, really understands this. The people who made this technology saw what it does.

They saw how powerful and addictive it is. Steve Jobs would not let his kids use an iPad. And many, I don't know what percentage, but a large percentage of the tech founders of the tech moguls, they send their kids to the Waldorf School, which has zero technology, like not even a computer. I mean, they do have a room with computers, so the kids do learn how to use computers. But the classroom is zero technology like not even a computer i mean they do have a room with computers so the kids do learn how to use computers but the classroom is zero technology this is what the people who make the products do because they know what it does to kids it's sort of a grim picture because well yeah how do you put the you know you can't put the toothpaste back in the bottle here

well so you know if if our kids lives if you're well do you do you guys have kids i'm assuming not you're still in your young wild and crazy age no no kids when you have kids if someone says here's some toothpaste if you don't put it back in the tube i'm going to kill your kids yeah what would you do yeah you put it back i think you'd find a way to put it back sure is it the law because when you described it being like a slot machine and you're like the people at facebook basically use the psychology the same way as a slot machine and you're like the people at facebook basically use the psychology the same way as a slot machine like you just said and it was kind of like is and then you like the proposals there's kind of you know it's supposed to be 13 but they don't enforce it at all and then so

it kind of feels like uh nothing's gonna happen nothing has happened so far. We have two terrible pieces of legislation in the 90s that's created this mess. One, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act said, you know, AOL or whoever, if you're putting up stuff, you can't be sued because nobody can sue you because someone else put up something. And there was a good reason for that. I mean, that makes some sense. But the law has been interpreted so widely as to say, whatever you show to our kids, whatever algorithms you choose to feed my daughter, you know, self-harm, whatever it is, that's just, you know, you're just a platform. You're not a publisher. You're not responsible. So, a terrible law setting up the internet that said they, like the gun makers, they're the only two industries that have just complete blanket

immunity. We can't sue them. And then the other terrible law said, how old do you have to be before, this was in 1997 or 98, how old does a child have to be before they can sign up with, you know, AOL or whatever those companies were back then, and give away their data and their rights without their parents' knowledge? At what age can companies treat a child like an adult? It's an important question. You have to have that if you're going to have an online world. And the age that was picked for the bill was 16 by Senator, he's now Senator Mark, he was in the House. He said 16 and put it forward. And there was fierce lobbying, a bunch of people said, no, no, that's terrible. No, we have to let kids on. And so they push it down to 13 with zero enforcement. The way the law is written, as long as Meta or any other company, as long as they don't have positive evidence

that a child is under 13, they're fine. They're fine. So they're incentivized to not know how old our kids are. They don't want to. Of course, they know everything about us, but they can claim that they don't know. And that's why we now have,

in the UK and the US, it's around a quarter of kids have a smartphone, their own smartphone now, and a lot of them have tiktok um by nine or ten a lot of the many of the girls have instagram because the platforms even though they know how old these kids are they're they're in a collective action trap if if meta were to enforce its age limit all the kids would just go to tiktok so they're in a race to the bottom of the of you know a race to the bottom of the of the age uh the the age spectrum um so anyway i'm sorry this was all is it because the lobby is so strong that because i know if you think about it like in terms of like tobacco or things like that

is is the reason it's just like there's not like a will to do anything about it or is it straight up that they just these people these are like powerful companies that you're not gonna beat them yeah no i think it's it's I think it's not quite either of those. I think once we understand how this all got started with these two laws in the 90s, when we didn't know what the internet was going to be. At the time, you know, there was the idea of a bulletin board. You can post stuff. But we didn't know with video coming, with, you know, beheading videos and all the stuff that was going to come later. We didn't know.

So it's sort of like, you know, the mythical story of the frog in the pod as you heat the water like things got worse and worse but all the way up through 2012 we were still techno optimists we still thought our iphones were amazing and they are you know uber is amazing uh you know social media is bringing down dictators in the arab world so even through 2012 we were all still pretty optimistic about this well it sounds like you're not even not being optimistic you're just saying it's different for kids exactly yeah exactly and what would you propose just some sort of regulations okay no so all right so so so um the way we got into this was slowly uh slowly slowly slowly the companies were of course powerful but they're not superheroes they can be defeated in a court. It's also that people couldn't see a way out. And just as with you guys, you know, you're, you know, Danny, you said you can't put the

toothpaste back in the tube. This is the main counter argument I get is, well, you know, the trains left the station, what are you going to do? The phones are here to stay, we have to meet kids where they are. You know, if the kids are down playing on the railroad tracks, I don't think we have to meet them where they are. I think we have to take them off the railroad tracks. And so what I'm proposing is a way out of the resignation. That is to acknowledge, for each parent, if you want to hold out and not give your kid a smartphone, your kid is now isolated. Your kid is cut off from the other kids in class, and she'll be made fun of.

So if you do this alone, you're trapped. hard and some mothers some parents do yeah i mean that was like when i was a kid with tv there was always like a couple kids in your class who you know you'd be talking about whatever tv and they're like i don't have tv yeah and it is kind of isolating but i don't think it turned out poorly right that's right but it's a hundred times more powerful now yeah well they were weird at the time no question but i'm saying in the long run i don't know if it was necessarily that's right no well a little bit of tv is fine but those who you know but whatever whenever you look at kids in technology use the heavy users the ones who are using anything three four five hours a day you do find worse outcomes compared to the ones who are

light users so it probably didn't matter but social media is so much more powerful because it's not just that you don't know what videos to talk about the next day in class, it's that people are actually talking to each other and you're not there, so they're talking about you. So anyway, the point is, it's a collective action trap, it's a collective action problem, and people haven't been able to solve that on their own. What I'm proposing is four norms, even if we never get help from Congress, if a bunch of families just enact four norms, we can break the back of this problem. We can get us most of the way out. And they're very simple. One is no smartphones before high school. We've just got to clear it

out of the lives of middle school kids. Give them a flip phone. I'm not saying they can't text each other. I'm saying they can't have the internet in their pocket 24 hours a day, or they will be on the internet all the time so no smartphones before high school clear it out of middle school um no social media till 16 i mean this is so inappropriate for minors the things that the kids see the pornography the violence uh i just i didn't watch it but i learned about the video cat in a blender it's exactly what you think it is it turns out it probably was digitally manipulated, probably wasn't actually killing the kitten. But, you know, millions and millions of kids saw this, and it sure looks real. So, this stuff is just so wildly inappropriate for minors. The porn, the hardcore porn, the things that are sent around. So, I'm just saying, you know, ideally,

18 should be the age, I think, but we're not going to meet that as a norm. My goal is to propose a norm that we might actually gravitate towards. And so'm saying 16 let's just delay till 16 did what did china do this oh china does whatever it wants they just say you know what no tiktok after 10 oh and by the way tiktok is going to show stories of astronauts and patriotic people and tiktok is going to make you better and yes the chinese are in a struggle to the death with the united states that's the way they see it at least and tikt TikTok is basically a direct line from, well, it's not a direct line, an indirect line from the Communist Party, which can control, it has the right to tell TikTok what to do.

So I think, at the very least, they're pretty happy with what TikTok is doing to degrade the character lives and mental health of American children. So, yeah, it's a complete disaster. And so, you know, it's bad enough for anyone to be on that at 18, but why should our 9, 10, 11-year-olds be socialized by TikTok? So no social media until 16. The third norm is phone-free schools. And this is just a no-brainer.

You know, when I was a kid, class was sometimes boring. But if they said, you know what? You can bring in your television, your record player, your walkie-talkies, bring in a harmonica, bring in, you know, whatever you want.

Have it on your desk. Use it during class. Like, that would be completely insane. We couldn't learn anything. But when kids have smartphones, even if they're supposed to be in their pockets, that's what happens. Because the rule at most schools is

you have to hide your phone beneath the table or in a book is you have to hide your phone beneath the table or in a book if you want to be on it during class we're not going to allow you to use it visibly so it's insane what we're doing to education and test scores are going down not just in the u.s but around the world since 2012 so anyway phone free schools then the fourth norm is far more independence free play and responsibility in the real world. Because we've got to reduce screen time for kids by 80%, 90%. We've got to get them not being manipulated by companies all day long. But we're not just going to take that away.

We're going to give them back a real childhood. Like, I imagine when you guys were kids, you spent a lot of time playing with your friends, right? Isn't that what you did after school for the most part and on weekends? Yeah, getting in trouble. Yeah, that's right. Kids don't have the right to do that anymore. They can't get in trouble. They can't do anything.

They have to always be supervised. Give them a lot more freedom. Let them get into some trouble. Give them errands to do in the real world. Send your kids out to get groceries. Give them money and go get pizza together. Whatever it is, they have to get away from you. You can't be there all the time or they won't learn to be

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That equates to over 40% off your starter pack. You use the code BOYSCAST at shopmando.com. That is S-H-O-P-M-A-N-D-O dot com. Shopmando.com for $5 off the starter pack with this exclusive code. Dude, I thought that one of the coolest things was, like, if you look at the differences between, like, how it's affecting guys and girls, because you always hear people sort of saying like, you know, things have gotten more feminine a little bit, right?

And then you sort of had the stats where it was like, if you look at a study, guys from, you know, now at, you know, 20 or whatever, have the same answers as women from 10 years ago. So it's like empirically true. That's right. That's right. So that was one of the most shocking findings. So the book goes into great detail on why social media is worse for girls, and why boys are getting lured into video games, porn, other things that damage them in very

different ways from the girls. So the boy's story, the girl's story is very different. But one thing that's happening to both of them, both sexes, is they're getting pushed more towards the feminine kind of psychopathology from the past. So before 2012, it's always been the case that girls and women have more of what we call internalizing disorders. So negative emotions turned inwards, you suffer. That's anxiety and depression. So rates of anxiety and depression have always been higher among girls and women than among boys and men. That's true for as long as we know. Boys suffer more from externalizing

disorders. They make other people miserable. They have more drug addiction, violence, risk-taking. So girls and boys have slightly different pathologies. But what's happened, and we show this with data in the book, is that both sexes have shifted more over towards internalizing disorders, which means girls are now far more depressed and anxious than they were. And they're a little bit, they always had low levels. I mean, girls weren't destroying bathrooms back before, but they're doing vandalism even less. But they were already so low. Boys used to be doing vandalism and risk-taking and drunk driving, all kinds of bad stuff. So they're doing a lot less of that.

Well, that's good. But they are more anxious and depressed too. And what we show in the book is that it's not just like, oh, isn't it great that boys aren't doing stupid things and getting killed in car accidents? Of course that's great. But it's that they're not doing anything that is risky. And so the most stunning graph I think in the book is the one where we show that up to about 2010, 2012, the people most likely to go to the hospital for a broken bone were teenage boys, of course, and then followed by young men in their 20s.

Those are the risk takers. And so especially if you zoom in on broken arms, broken wrists, you know, the CDC tracks all this stuff. What you see is that teenage boys used to have the highest rates by far. Probably have the highest rates of sore wrists now. Well yeah that's right there you go you know what they should code for that that's right because uh now boys um boys rates of broken bones broken arms especially are lower than their fathers or grandfathers they are they are slightly lower even than middle-aged men because boys are not doing anything that could break a bone now you're right they might still be using their right hand because porn is everywhere for them but i've never heard of a guy who broke his wrist doing that he goes pretty hard that would

be epic sure that was the interesting like the most interesting part to me and uh kind of uh it sort of described how i even think about because like you sort of look back to the risky people and like to some degree all of my like successful friends were somewhat like you know risky people back in the day you know what i mean but you look back and you're like yeah at the time they were kind of you know a little risky but if you actually look at it now there was some level of like riskiness that ended up like you know making people more successful exactly And so, that's another, I hope, really interesting and novel idea in the book that people may not have heard. Even when you're, sorry to interrupt, but even if you're talking to a girl or whatever it is, those things are all kind of risky behavior.

Exactly. No, that's right. That's right. Kids have to take risks in order to overcome their anxieties in order to become a force in the world. And so in chapter two or three, I go into play in both chapters two and three, and there's some recent research. We've known for a long time children must play. If you deprive baby rats or baby rhesus monkeys of play, they are socially malformed, they're anxious, they don't explore. So we've known for a long time kids need to play. malformed, they're anxious, they don't explore. So, and we've known for a long time, kids need to play. But there's more recent research in theorizing that what they really need is thrills. Pardon me? Is some... It's a funny word to say, technically.

But so what they, that they really, really need some fear and some thrills. And so if you think about going to an amusement park, they're brilliant because they're really scary, but totally physically safe. And so when I would take my kids, you know, I'd take them with friends, and it was a lot of the talk was like, you know, oh, I'm going to try the thunderbolt. Oh, no, that's too scary for me. Each kid is at a different level, even though they're the same grade. One kid is a little bit more willing to take risks and experience fear. And if he does it, he doesn't come out afraid.

He comes out jumping up and down. He did it. He faced down. He wants to go again. He wants to go again. Exactly. Yeah, he goes, let's do that again. Let's do it again.

Or let's take an even bigger risk. That's right. So yeah, your friends who were willing to take some risks, they probably ended up happily married. They probably ended up founding companies. Whereas the kids who were afraid of risk are less likely to end up happily married less likely to approach a girl less like take a chance on a relationship um and less likely to take a risk and found a company or do something big they probably go for safe corporate jobs i feel like it kind of

describes everything because you were saying that even when you think about like women or even when we do stand up you were kind of saying that like what you need is small failure like a lot of times as opposed to when it's you know that's why i always say that like famous people it's very hard for them to do stand-up because like the risk of failure is too high at the beginning where it's like what you need to do is go fail like a thousand times you know in a row or whatever like most jobs are like that picking up girls or whatever it's like you can't have it like the first time you ever do it if she turns you down this is a big public spectacle exactly that's right and that's a key feature of play is that kids make mistakes and they make mistakes every day and the consequences are low kids need low

you know low stakes failure that's what the words were low stakes failure low stakes failure but on social media if you make a mistake it could go viral and and you'll be thinking about suicide you know if everyone's laughing at you if everyone is is mocking you uh it's it's paralyzing it's horrifying for anyone especially for children how's it got specific because i know it's probably only been three maybe two years three years on instagram where like things can just randomly go viral maybe like five years for TikTok, where you can just, a regular person with five followers could post something and get 10 million views.

Is it worse in that time period? Oh, yes. So the mental illness keeps going up and up. Occasionally there are plateaus, but there's not been any reversal that I've seen. It's never come down since it began rising around 2013 in the US and around then also in all the English-speaking countries

and in Northern Europe. That's where we have data have data so it's happening worldwide um and just wait one more point on the uh was there something else to say about the risk oh you know what i want to ask you guys a question which is have you have you seen any generational differences in comedians like the ones younger than you are there uh you know are there you know what i was thinking that even just like working with young people in general one of the things that i found it's hard to explain perfectly but they're always looking for rules for things like they want you to be like it's kind of like imagine you gave someone an assignment and they're like well what should i do here and you're like well i want you to like develop the instincts to make those

decisions and they want like rules for everything and you're kind of like yeah if rules could do this i could a computer could do it like so it's like they almost they're like i feel like a lot of times young people don't want to develop the instincts i guess you could say that in stand-up too like instead of being like yeah there is no perfect answer for this you want to have the right instincts to make the right choices and the right you know whether that be like the same way you play a sport. And I feel like everyone wants like rules for things, you know, they want like a set of, oh, you just give me like a system and you're just like, because the world sort of maybe sort of set up like that more for young people. But I noticed that more for young people. And I'm like, I can't give you rules. If I could write a code and tell you the exact rules,

then a computer could do this job. That's right. So part of that might be the educational system. It might be that there's ever more structured assignments. I don't know that for sure. But this is what you said. It's something I've heard a lot from employers. I work in a business school. I'm at NYU Stern. So I talk to people in business a lot. And I always ask them, how are your Gen Z employees doing? You know, how's it going? We have this generational change. And of course, every generation complains about the one behind. You know, Gen X and baby boomers like me, end of the baby boom, you know, we complained about millennials that,

oh, you know, you expected snacks at work. Oh, you, you know. So that's- That's speaking your language. Kids these days. Yeah, that's right. So kids these days, that's always been there. That's been there for hundreds of years.

So that's normal. But what's happening now is people are saying, my Gen Z employees, it's like they won't do anything on their own. Like they need guidance. They want to clear exactly what you said. So I'm hearing this also from many employers. So again, this is not Gen Z's fault.

Nothing here should be like mocking kids. My basic argument is we deprived them of what they most needed, which was free play. We said, you can't take any risks and grow. We said to the boys, here, you can be on video games all the time. You don't have to toughen up or learn to be independent. And then the same poor generation, then they get hit with COVID as they're either going through college or entering the job market. And of course, they were given smartphones and social media in puberty.

So none of this is to put any blame on them. It's more to say we didn't let them grow up and as a result when they're employed or when they go on stage or you know um they're different so are there are there so gen z the oldest are now 28 can i play can i ask a devil's advocate question those are great because there's also another part of it where you're kind of like okay uh obviously there is a bit of it where sort of i'm like the game's the game in terms of okay so you're like hey let's not have these kids grow up on the internet but it's like well their life is going to be that so a lot of times the one positive thing i'll see versus like let's say

someone that's 20 right now versus someone our age someone our age i feel like we'll have like everyone mad at them on the internet and it's like feels way more real to them whereas them i i know a lot of there is a lot of younger people they're like yeah there's just the internet like it kind of they're more when you're saying the small risky things they've also they've also had that their whole life so it they're used to like yeah sometimes everyone's gonna be mad at you i don't know so that's that's a really important open psychological question is you know if in the physical world, you know, if you if you get scratched up, you you don't fear scratches as much. If you're exposed to physical threats, you don't fear them as much, you overcome them, you get tough because we're

anti fragile. But it isn't clear to me that that works for social shaming. And when I ask when I give talks to, you know, high school students or college students, I ask, you know, does, when you if you get publicly shamed on the internet, if everyone's laughing at you and making fun of you, does that make you, afterwards, does that make you more gun-shy? Does that make you more afraid, like walking on eggshells? Or does that make you like, ah, I don't care. Maybe it's just a few people come out the other end better,

but most people just shut down. Yeah, most people aren't designed for that kind of life. That's right. You're probably right. Because our anti-fragility is not, it doesn't work for shaming. Being publicly shamed doesn't make you immune to public shame. It actually makes you more sensitive to it. So it's a different psychological mechanism.

Yeah, and public shaming, I guess, used to be like a very, I guess, valid tool for self kind of governing little. It used to be all we had. Right, yeah. Other than killing people, yeah. Other than killing people, but if you live in some little village or whatever. That was kind of one of the good points you were like the two things are socializing within a society it's like there's one you want to kind of figure out the norms and then two figure out like what it looks like being great you know and then you're

just like so for people on that are young you're like what it looks like being great for a lot of girls specifically you're like someone that's on the internet and famous for doing nothing or showing their tits, and then what it looks like being normal is like you yell at everybody. Yeah, that's right, that's right. So there's a critical period for cultural learning, and researchers have studied why is it that human childhood

has this long, slow period? Because we grow fast until around the age of five or six, and we slow down for a number of years. Freud called it the latency period, when suddenly boys and girls won't play with each other, they're very separate. But what they're doing is they're learning how to be a boy in my culture, how to be a girl in my culture, how to be a man and a woman, I should say. And so they're doing very gender-segregated things. This is traditionally in most societies, and it still is true even, you know, no matter

how much we try to push boys and girls together, at that age, you know, eight, nine, ten, they prefer to play with their own sex. And then as they hit puberty, now in most traditional cultures, elders are helping them make the transition from child to adult. And it's not the parents. This is very important. It's never the parents whose job to socialize the kid. There's always, you know, for a girl, it's going to be an older woman trusted by the family. For a boy, it's going to be an older man. Often boys are done together as a group of initiates who go through hardships together, kind of like fraternity hazing. But the point is that the previous generation or the older generation, they're the ones who decide what experiences the kids are going to have in order to become good members of the society. But what we've done is we've said, we're not going to do that. We're too busy. We don't know what we'd say. Oh, and you know what? Here, just be

on TikTok all day long, where random weirdos on the internet who are selected by algorithms for their extremity are going to be the ones in your feed. And then that's what will appear normal, and not just normal, but prestigious. Because what do you want? You want to be an influencer too. You want to have as many followers as you can. That's what you're judged on. So, you know, once we understand human development, it's completely insane what we're doing to kids. I always like when you kind of mentioned like the actual stats in that department

because, you know, it's so easy. People, they'll just say things. They'll be like, well, yeah, for like minorities, for example, you're very um you know secluded and you actually it's better for you to be able to find people for your community and you're like well except the stats don't show that it says they're getting more depressed exactly that's right so one of the arguments i was here is well but you know social media is so great for marginalized kids lgbtq they can find people you know they're not so isolated especially

if they don't live in a major city. And my answer is twofold. One, well, that was true about the internet, like the internet did that, you know, in the 90s, it was a godsend for LGBTQ kids. Like, yes, you could find all these, all these groups of interest, you could find information. Pete Glorial chat rooms. Jared So, the, well, there were though, that's right. But, but my point is, social media is not the same as the internet. when you look at the experience of lgbtq kids on social media they're even more likely to say that they would be better off without it they get more trashed more shredded they have more problems yeah so you know don't don't accept and they get probably uh put into like uh bad idea like you get

put into bad like rabbit holes that make you more depressed yeah and there's no gamification of the internet really like the internet wasn't gamified in the sense that social media is where you're trying to like win that's right the incentive structure of social media is very very specific and very very much like gambling it really is you know and you know as i said in the book i mean some of the techniques used in the gambling industry because of course slot machines are extremely carefully designed to hook people and so some of the techniques uh especially you know when you when you pull it down literally the refresh exactly it looks just like a slot machine that's right i feel like all this stuff affects adults

too as much as kids you know yes and no it definitely affects us all well some of it the reason why it's different is because if you got all the stuff when you were done with puberty, it can still make you miserable. But it's not going to go back and change your brain wiring the same way as if the day you start puberty. Let's imagine an 11-year-old girl, 12-year-old girl. You know, she's already got a smartphone for a couple years. She opens an Instagram account at 11 or 12. She is deluged with images of perfect beautiful women and of her own friends looking extra beautiful she feels inferior she notices that

when they pose in a sexy way with their butt out their boobs out where you know they they get more likes and so she starts doing that before you know it middle school girls are being pornified now if this is their sexual development and the boy's sexual development is violent porn or just, you know, hardcore sex and choking and anal sex and all that stuff, like, how are boys and girls going to get together and have satisfaction? Like, this is going to be terrible. And it is terrible. They're not dating as much. This can be very hard for them to connect in a way, hard to fall in love, hard to get married and then on top of that you were kind of like the idea that and i feel this but it's just like non-stop you know whatever every once in a while you're checking it but that can

be every five minutes and then you're just like if you look at all that you go this person hasn't concentrated on one thing for more than four minutes ever that's right he's like that can't be good for you definitely makes it more difficult to concentrate yeah especially like you know for us like we it's a tool for our work, essentially. And sometimes I'll find myself going to check, like, oh, I have a message that I need to respond to, and then I'm 20 minutes into just... But it's the collective bargaining thing that you sort of said,

because we have a body that has a bar that we... I guess you weren't there. I went to in Austin, and it was like, you're not allowed to have your phones, right? Oh, wow, that's great. It it's great except for the rest of the world still on their phones so everyone's like why aren't you messaging me someone's trying to meet up with you like so it's like everyone has everyone in the world it's kind of like why well why covid was good a little bit where for people that like work too much you're like well

and we all everyone kind of it's a shared experience when we all had a little more time at first that's right for a week yeah so so let me put the word um presence in here um are you are you fully present and so in the 60s you know the big it was you know be here now was the model like the psychedelic age and there's a lot of interest in buddhism and hinduism and meditation and you know ancient wisdom my first book was called the happiness hypothesis it's about ancient wisdom um and the ancients in all in many societies tell us sit still calm your mind your mind is a is just a tornado of garbage and stuff swirling around focus meditate and then your heart will open to god to the universe to other. And so this has been good advice for thousands and thousands of years. And in the 60s and 70s, a lot of people tried to do that more. That was sort of like what the counterculture was, was try to be more present. But once we get not just the

internet and computers, but especially smartphones and social media, once we get notifications, so the original smartphone was an amazing Swiss Army knife, 2007. But in 2008, you get the App Store. 2009, I think it is, you get push notifications. And now you have thousands of companies trying to get your attention all the time. So human consciousness changes in the early 2010s, and it becomes much, much harder to ever be present for more than 30 seconds. There's a beautiful phrase from Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT.

I quote it twice in the book, I think. She says, because of our technology, because of our devices, we are forever elsewhere. We are never, we're not with the people in the room. We're with other people in the virtual world. Yeah.

Even the whatever experiment you're talking about where they were trying to level out the IQs or whatever with the buzzing in the ear. Oh, yeah. Or whatever, something like that. Oh, that was good, yeah. I do sometimes think about that, even just like you turn your ringer off, and then you just feel buzz. And then like the phantom. Yeah, the phantom buzzing.

I get that, too. The phantom buzzing or whatever. And then you're like, yeah. What was the thing, though? Say it. I can't remember. Specifically. It was a story. It was not an experiment it was a it was a short story

by kurt vonnegut called harrison bergeron and it's actually you guys would love it it's it's a you know it's a sort of a parody of sort of you know progressivism taken to the extreme where in the future you know like 100 years from now the united states has passed uh constitutional amendments 234 235 and 236 say that everyone is equal like actually equal like the government's job is to make sure that everyone is actually equal so if you are a good dancer well you have to wear weights on your feet because you shouldn't be better than anyone else and if if you are very intelligent, you have to wear a little radio transmitter in your ear, and the government will send random noises every minute or two to interrupt your thinking. That way, you won't be any smarter than anyone else. So everyone, by law, must end up

equal. And so anyway, it's a — Yeah, but that's our life now, where it's like everyone has the less smartening device. Yeah, the less smartening buzzer thing. That's right. So we are, you know, in some ways these devices make us, they do make us smarter. I can do a lot more research thanks to the technology. You know, I love my computer. I love Google and Apple.

But unless you get a handle on the notifications, the distraction effects, the interruption effects will outweigh the productivity gains. And we certainly see this with kids. As I said, test scores, like global test scores scores are going down around the world humanity is getting less intelligent since 2012 and i believe it's because of the massive distraction we're not present even in school people always kind of argue that they can multitask but i always argue that like that's not you can't do two things at once you're just starting over and over again you just do them both badly yeah so because you lose a lot in the tree you're doing them both on autopilot or or

what is it oh well no i mean okay there are some things that you can do you know like you can you can wash the dishes and listen to a podcast yeah exactly like i can i can listen to a podcast but you can't watch a phone and right you can't do two audio you can't do two language-based things so if you're watching a video you can't like watch a video and also be in class. You can't be doing something and also really attending to your partner. Now, maybe driving is automatic enough. You could have a deep discussion. But even still, there are distractions. So it's hard for humans to be fully present with another human. And one of the reasons that we're so lonely these days, loneliness is way up over the last couple of decades, I think is because we're just very rarely fully present with another human being.

It does sort of feel like, that's why I'm saying like a part of me feels like, I think I agree with it. When you're talking about kids, it's like, okay, probably make those rules. But with like adults, there is a part where you're just like, yeah, this ain't changing. So unfortunately, that's what it's going to keep being more increasingly towards. Let me push back on that because I've been so focused on Gen Z and especially on kids in elementary and middle school because that's where we can make a huge difference tomorrow. Like if schools go phone free. Because it changes the culture?

Well, it changes their development. If we get kids before they hit puberty and then change. So I've been really focused on on gen z and especially younger gen c i'd love to talk about millennials i don't do that very much um so so you guys let's talk about what it would take for the technology to be just much more positive and much less negative um what are you guys doing about notifications i'll tell you my first one okay okay so for with the algorithms right the way that it's designed is what you look at more uh they give you more right however that's actually not what you want like for example if you were walking around all day and you were hungry it obviously you want mcdonald's more the same way

that if i was walking and there was a guy giving a motivational speech and then a girl standing there naked I might look at the girl standing naked longer that doesn't mean for the rest of the day

I want girls naked everywhere all day long every day that's all I get but you see what I'm saying so you go or like a deformed person like if you walk by

and there's someone that's like really deformed I'm going to look at that longer because you're just like naturally you're like oh that's interesting that doesn't mean that's what I want more of if you actually ask and there's someone that's like really deformed, I'm going to look at that longer because you're just like naturally you're like, oh, that's interesting. That doesn't mean that's what I want more of. If you actually ask me, so it's like that's such a bad measure of what an enjoyable experience

is in life or on phones over like a long term is just what you look at more. So I think that would be nice if you could get almost like you could choose your own algorithm. I know they obviously don't want you to do that, but if you could get almost like you could choose your own algorithm. I know they obviously don't want you to do that, but if you could set the parameters and you say, I'd like an algorithm that, you know. So that would be a step in the right direction, give you a little more control over the feed.

Tell me about dating apps, because I'm just beginning to study that, and it seems as though, you know, there was an article in The Atlantic a few years ago about the millennial sex recession, that your generation, which was the first one that could swipe for sex, I mean, you could actually have sex with two different people tonight if you wanted to. That was never possible for me growing up

in the 80s and 90s. Do the dating apps, the swipe-based dating apps, do they improve sex and do they improve love? Do you think people in your generation, do they help you find love? Danny had it when that first stuff came out, Danny had a hack. Yeah, there was an app. Bonfire.

Yeah, bonfire. So I got out of a relationship, and then literally the next week, Tinder came out. And I was like, you know, I must have, this is, I don't know, 10, 12 years ago. It was incredible. And I was saying to somebody the other day, it was so good because now a lot of people have their guards up and everybody has like a million horror stories so but at the time nobody knew better they're just like oh this is just this amazing app and it was it was people who want to have sex yeah exactly and it wasn't even yeah and people just like this is a such a novel way to meet people and because if you remember right before

tinder it was only the most uh undesirable people who dated online right like that was like the weird all the weird people would go on websites to meet each other and then for whatever reason tinder and i guess it was because of the iphone right? Changed that, and it was actually a cool, normal thing. And yeah, I mean, it was great. I didn't meet, like my fiancée, I didn't meet her on an app. I met her in person, which is seemingly rare, I guess. But it was good at the time. I haven't used it in a while, though. But what's your judgment about the effect that these apps have had on your generation?

I think the biggest effect is, I don't know what the word is, hypergamy maybe, but I think it more adds to that, where it's like, you know, a smaller percentage of the guys get all the girls. Like, it's not like all the dudes are banging more, it's more just like a few guys are banging way more.

It's a huge inequality. Yeah, it is a huge inequality. Like, it very much is that... Well, you're not competing against these guys, you're competing against every guy, so the main, you know, guys that are good with women just get, like, way more... Like, I talked to some guys who say, I get literally zero matches.

They're like, I can't get a single match. Right. So this is devastating. This makes most of the guys feel like losers, feel as though things are hopeless. And, you know, this is, you know, there's research around the world, also by Joe Henrich at Harvard. I can't remember the exact findings. But basically, when you have polygamy, and most guys are going to end up with nothing,

they're much more violent. They have nothing to lose. You have much more social instability. But when everyone can kind of count on finding a partner, there's much more social stability. Yeah, well, instead of banging everyone, you're like, now he has to bang his wife. It tames you. And I can tell you, when you have kids, it lowers your testosterone. It does tame you.

Anyway, my point is that if most of the guys are feeling like this is hopeless, that's incredibly bad for the guys and for society. And if a few of the guys are feeling like, hey, I can have my pick, that's a pretty good way to make jerks and assholes. Because they don't have to be nice to women. So, of course, the women all have horror stories. And the women think that men are terrible because they're all going for the same pricks who don't have to worry about whether they're standing.

You're like number nine on the roster. He's not going to give you that much attention. So, right there, we see that the move, okay, and this is a real theme of the technology. It makes things easier, but yet worse. So, if it makes it easier to find partners then you don't have to make the normal effort you don't learn the same things you don't have the same experiences and what i want to ask you about now is falling in love because um humans because we do pair bond very few mammals do but we do pair bond we have the ability to stay together for a while

we fall in love but to fall in love takes courtship. And if you jump into bed with someone, you're much less likely to fall in love with them ever. Then if you meet and you make eye contact, and there's that kind of like burning, exciting, like, wait, wow, we just, you know, made eye contact. And then you, you know, you talk, and then you express a little interest, but not too much, not too much. And the next day you, you know, whatever. But if it plays out over time, then you fall madly in love. And most young people want to fall madly in love. And it's probably the greatest thing. I mean, along with parenthood, it's the greatest feeling that you can have.

And my concern is that once it was so easy to find sex, at least for some guys, to find sex, at least for some guys. But once you often have sex quickly before drawing it out, you're cutting off the ability of your generation to fall in love. That's my hypothesis. What do you think? I mean, I think potentially.

I don't know enough of people maybe who are in that generation in terms of their dating habits, but I think i think it's possible there's there's sort of there's always been talk of guys who are like really good with women and who get tons of women you know probably have like a harder time making like actual long-term connections um you know there's probably a positive and negative to everything i mean some of it is that you know you kind of don't have women on such a pedestal so you're like this is just a person and you know there's some degree of like oh this person's so special where it's like guys that have been with you know the same rate that

some people have had a lot of jobs or had a lot of money money's not important to them so i think it's more there is just that where it's like there's an abundance instead of a scarcity mindset about it which there's positives and negatives to that there's probably like a success connotation that comes to that way of thinking but there's also maybe like a less happiness which it sounds like but you probably say that about all things that you know like you said you know the there are probably a lot of tools that make you very successful but you know that doesn't necessarily add to your like necessary value or happiness of your life maybe yeah right yeah i wonder how it plays out in smaller towns

and stuff too like because you know if you ever go to smaller towns i remember like we go you go on the road and you're in some small town doing comedy and you go on tinder like when i was single and there's eight people yeah you know what i mean like fish they're all holding fish and skidoo jackets and stuff or whatever but like you know so but in new york city like i never i didn't really date here ever but you know you hear horror stories of people who are like, yeah, I'm, you just, like people are not even that they want to, they're like, you have to be talking to 10 people at one time. It's just a. That's right. So there's research by the professor, long ago she was at University of North Carolina, Carol Rustbolt.

I remember she gave a talk, I was a professor at the University of Virginia for 17 years, and she gave a talk on her work. And I remember she talked about how there's research showing the more options you have, the harder it is to commit, the more marriages are unstable. And so, if you're in a small town and there aren't a lot of options, you might fall in love with someone, and then you're likely to stay with them. But if you're in a big city, it's guaranteed that the then you're likely to stay with them but if you're in a big city it's guaranteed that the person you're with is not the best person in the city i mean the odds that you met the very so there's always somebody it's like the big menu it's like you get the decision fatigue from a giant menu because you go guaranteed i'm not ordering the

best thing here it does remind me of the food thing you're like it might be better to have like more options but it's actually better to have two options to choose absolutely yeah you know maybe three or four you know but but a small number single digits probably it depends on the on the domain but that's the point is basically backing up what you know what you guys just said that if you're in a big city and you have these dating apps so it looks like there are just so many people around it's harder to fall in love and if you do fall in love it's going to be much easier to fall out of love or, you know, or cheat on the person or whatever. But, you know, the research in positive psychology is very clear. The two big things that really help happiness are religion and marriage. People who are bound in, they're locked in, they're tied into a community are

happier and less likely to kill themselves than people who are free, single, you can do whatever you want. And so I am concerned that your generation, and especially Gen Z, religion is plummeting, especially in Gen Z, and I think dating is plummeting, and I think marriage is going to plummet. I mean, the age, definitely, and I mean, neither of us are helping this, but the age at which people get married and stuff right now is getting, like, guys so much older. Yeah. Now, in part, that's just a historical progression.

So there is an historical progression, which is normal, which is just that childhood is getting lengthened. So when my grandparents were coming up, you go to work at 14. You work in the factory, you work in the sewing shop, whatever it was. you go to work at 14 you know you work in the factory you work in the sewing shop whatever it was um so and then when my parents you know they're born in the 20s and 30s when they were getting married it was normal to get married when you know for a for a woman when you're you know eight you know 18 was perfectly normal but certainly when you graduate from college at 21 you should get married then like that's the age to get married so we're lengthening childhood that's not bad if it's just that you

get to marriage later. But if it's that you're not getting to marriage at all, then we're missing out on a huge benefit to society, to neighborhoods, to stability. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you are, you know, dating, then it could easily just extend that whole period, too, because you're like, well, who knows who's next? And you know, you just keep kind of, yeah. Yeah. Fellas, it's important that the supplements I take are of the highest quality. And that's why for years I've been taking AG1 every single morning. Unlike many supplement brands, AG1 conducts relentless testing to set the standard for purity and potency. AG1 is researched and developed by in-house team of scientists, doctors, nutritionists with decades of experience in their respective fields.

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and get a free one-year supply of vitamin d3 plus k2 and five free ag1 travel packs with your first subscription at drinkag1.com slash boys cast that's drinkag1.com slash boys cast to check it out that's right it kind of a lot of things that a lot of people have said i guess you described as sort of like there's a spirituality problem where it's like that indefinable thing where you're like things got weird in the last little bit and you're what was the three axes that you said oh i can't remember the exact thing but i thought that was like a good point no thank you this is one of the most abstract ideas in the book but i'll try to do it um so i have a whole chapter chapter eight on spiritual elevation and degradation and i used to study an emotion called moral elevation like when

you hear a beautiful story you see an act of heroism or gratitude, it moves you, you feel something in your chest, and we feel lifted up. And so I called this feeling moral elevation, drawing on some writings by Thomas Jefferson actually had a beautiful description of it. And so in the book, I show how in social space, like social psychology, we usually talk about social space in two dimensions. There's hierarchy, up, down, and then there's closeness, sort of, you know, which is usually shown on a left-right axis. And you can put people, is it your boss? Are you friends with your boss? Like, you know,

people can be in different parts of that two dimensions. But my argument was that there's a third dimension, like a z-axis coming out of the plane, a z-axis, which is divinity. And this is something that sounds weird to say in our modern secular society, but all over the world, people have the sense that they are sometimes closer to God, sometimes further. They're sometimes living in a more divine or sanctified way, and sometimes in a more degraded, carnal, petty, ugly way. And so, you know, ancient wisdom about judge not lest ye be judged, and why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye but not the plank in your own?

All of this is to sort of get us to overcome our pettiness, our judgmentalism, to be more like Jesus, or more like God, or more like Buddha, in equanimity. So my argument is, we have thousands of years of advice on how to make spiritual progress, but as soon as life moves online, especially for young people, it's the exact opposite of spiritual progress. It's judge now, right away, with no context, because if you don't judge now, someone's going to judge you for not judging. Why didn't you chime in? Why didn't you like this thread? Why didn't you comment on that? You know, it's— Pete Slauson Sloppy life.

Jared It's—what's sloppy? Pete Slauson It's just like a sloppy life to live. Like, if you looked at someone and you're just like, oh, they're living in a pigsty, like, you'd probably say that's not a divine way to live. Like, just like a sloppy life. Jared Exactly, that's right. No, cleanliness is next to godliness. We have this sense that if a person is living in their own filth, they're not doing their laundry, they're leaving, you know, half-eaten chicken legs around, there's a sense that this is not just a personal choice. There's an ugliness to it. There's a sense that there's not a soul there. There's not a…

Pete The soul, it's like hard to explain, but I feel like it does explain it. Jared That's right. No, it is. You know, as I say in the book, I mean, I'm a Jewish atheist. I mean, I'm Jewish by ethnicity, but I'm not a believer. But I have come to have enormous respect for religion as not just a part of us, not just something that evolved, but actually a guide to a better way of living together in society. So I have enormous respect for religious traditions. And I see our modern social media-based life just pulling us away from that as fast as possible. I mean, religious people generally seem happier.

They are happier. Yeah. The key is community. The key is not people generally seem happier. They are happier. Yeah. The key is community. The key is not just belief in God. The key is they're part of a community. So are they happier than secular people that are part of a community? Oh, that's a good question. Yes, because if you look at, so religion is protective, but it's much more protective

if you're conservative, because conservative religions are very binding. You have obligations and duties, and God wants this, and God will punish that. Whereas progressive religions, especially, say, progressive Christian denominations, it's much looser, much more choice. There's much, you know, sort of – Pete You don't actually have to do it. Jared Yeah, that's right. You don't have to do it.

That's right. Pete Yeah. Jared Yeah. So there is evidence that religion is protective, but conservative religions are more protective. And it's particularly relevant here because there are some amazing graphs that Zach Rausch, my research partner, they're not in the book, but we made them afterwards. When you trace out who got washed away in 2013, which kids got washed away into depression and anxiety, it's the girls more than the boys. That's very clear. But it's also the left more than the right.

So high school kids, there is a survey that asks high school seniors, are you liberal or conservative? And what we see is a much bigger increase for liberals than for conservatives, and a much bigger increase for kids who say religion is not important in my life compared to those who say it is. So our argument here, we don't know for sure, but our argument is straight from Emile Durkheim, my favorite sociologist. argument here we don't know for sure but our argument is straight from emil durkheim my favorite sociologist it's if you are rooted in a community that constrains you and that shows you

a moral order this is what's good this is what's bad this is what you're supposed to do you may not always do it but you live within a moral universe you're sort of like a game that's winnable maybe okay there you go if that's great it's not infinite a game that's winnable versus something that's totally incoherent and you don't know what the rules are. You don't know how you're going to win. It's just chaos. Chaos, that's right. Yeah, it's just chaotic.

Perfect, perfect. That's it. Yeah. So, yeah. So, people – so, I don't mean this to insult secular people or people on the left. I mean this to say that religious conservatives have built-in protection from the craziness of our online lives. Secular people and liberal people are going to have to be a lot more deliberate about it. They're going to have to work harder to give themselves a Biden community, and especially

when they have kids, they're going to really have to work a lot harder to give their kids a stable, long-lasting community, ideally around one that has some moral values. You don't want your kids to just be online interacting with strangers for a day who are gone tomorrow. You know, they need, kids need to be rooted in community. Pete So if you look at the amount that people have gotten more or less depressed, like a lot of this, you're sort of putting a, you know, like the smartphone being kind of like the root of a lot of this. But then you're kind of also saying that, you know, people kind of, I mean, we all know someone that, you know know decide to be sort of like super progressive and then within three years all of a sudden they're

like depressed and you know on all the stuff because you go and sort of like a victim so it's like is it chicken or egg or are they just kind of moving together or which is which no that's right it could be it could be bi-directional causality uh one of our main arguments greg lukianoff and i in the coddling the american mind was that if you embrace these three great untruths, these three terrible ideas, we can pretty much guarantee you're going to be depressed and not amount to much in life. And so the three ideas are, what doesn't kill me makes me weaker, so I'd better avoid bad experiences. Don't bite Texas to Ryan Long's comedy show.

Well, if he ribs you from the stage, that would actually be good, you know, make your audience tougher. The second is always trust your feelings. So if you feel upset, then something is wrong in the world and someone has to fix it. And the third is life is a battle between good people and evil people. And you look out at the world, you see oppressors and victims everywhere. So if you believe all three of those things, you are very likely to be depressed, anxious, and you think the world is terrible. And so, yes, you know, sort of the left that came in around 2015, these ideas about microaggressions and safe spaces, all that stuff, Greg and I, that was Greg's initial insight, is that students who believe this stuff, they're believing the cognitive distortions that you're supposed to overcome with cognitive behavioral therapy. So yes, I do think that if you're in that culture that believes those things, the political

culture, it will make you more depressed and disempowered. And then conversely, if you are a person, suppose you show up at college and you're more anxious, whereas your roommate is more happy-go-lucky, positive, sociable. And now you both hear a lecture on how everything is oppression, everything is terrible, everything is, you know, good versus evil, everything's threatening. Your roommate's going to be like, that doesn't resonate with me. And you'd be like, what? Yeah, that helps explain why I'm so anxious. So, I think it is possible, probable, that there is bidirectional causality here. That was the best. My favorite stuff is probably always like the differences between men and women

because i'm kind of like obsessed with that stuff so i don't know if that's cool to me that you like it's all these things that i kind of would think but you had data for it but basically depression was um what's the right word for it? It spreads among women. If women are there. Is it contagious? It's contagious. Sorry, that was the right word. Yeah, but with guys, it's not contagious.

I've always kind of thought that if I'm around a bunch of girls that are depressed, it doesn't affect me. That's crazy. So depression spreads among girls like a wildfire. Yeah, and if you're around guys who are depressed, generally you just don't really want to hang out with them anymore. Why is that? Women might be a little more empathetic and that's right a little tolerated so so one of the master variables you probably has probably come

up on the podcast before do you know simon baron cohen and his work on autism i know sasha cousin or uncle yeah they're related yeah um so simon baronohen is a brilliant psychologist in the UK, at Cambridge, who's the world's expert on autism. And his finding over many decades is that, is that, so we all start off as girls in utero. I don't, but... Well, you did. You did. No, until you're... Nah, you're the wrong guy. Pause. At any rate, in utero, if you have a white chromosome, you get a little pulse of testosterone

that starts the ball rolling on making you a boy. And that changes not just your body, it changes some things in your brain. And what Baron Cohen found, I forget how much he talks about prenatal, but basically, by the time kids are born, boys are a little higher, well, boys are going to be higher on systemizing, lower on empathizing, which is the definition of actually of autism. His research on autism is on how autistic people have strengths. So being a high systemizer, like being able to understand grids of numbers and subway maps, this is a strength. And people who are autistic are extra high on that. strength. And people who are autistic are extra high on that. And being empathetic, being able to feel what someone's feeling, being able to know from what someone said what a third person must

be feeling, that's also a skill. And on average, girls are higher on empathizing, boys are higher on systemizing. So anyway, I'm sorry to sort of bring this all together. Boys are basically a little bit more autistic than girls are. They're just a little shifted over on the spectrum and so when a group of girls when one is depressed girls are more they're more empathetic they feel it more they're more open they want to know who's feeling what whereas guys are more like oh you know let's go let's go you know build this thing or knock this thing down together or let's go do sports together they're not like let's sit and talk for hours and hours yeah and so you know you often have the thing i i don't know well married people married guys

often have you know i'll go out with someone and my my wife will say oh and you know how's his wife i'm like oh i i didn't ask like we just you know we talked about ideas joke about that where he went golfing with his friend and his friend got divorced and he tells his wife and he goes, well, why did he get divorced? She's like, I don't know. He goes, is he dating someone new? He goes, I don't know. Never came up.

And I mean, I have the same thing all the time with stuff like that. So that's why. So, you know, girls, I mean, they have a much more evolved mental map of social space. They sort of understand who's really true. They want to keep it updated. And this is all the strength. They're more socially skillful guys are much clueless well yeah there's kind of that other part where it's like people that are sort of good with people i mean maybe not good with people but get people to like them who are more likable

match the energy of who they're talking to you know yeah so it's like when girls are talking to someone that's depressed they're not going to be like oh i'm i actually had an amazing day they might be like yeah you're right it is bad because then that person will like them more yes no you're right about that uh i gave a talk in australia just before covid and a 16 year old girl came up to me and said you know thank you for this talk wild ass she's like seen up there no i don't know you don't hear that oh yeah oh yeah fire drugs and everything sorry it's just new york look whenever whenever you talk to someone in new york city i always hear sirens at some point but this girl came up to me she said you know thank you for for showing

me what's going on because she says all my friends are depressed and i have to act like i'm depressed she just felt ah exactly to act depressed and if you start you know and in some ways things loop back so if you act depressed if you if you come to you know if you if you if you resonate with depressive cognitions it could actually make you depressed sure i mean yeah yeah definitely but do you do you uh i'm curious what were your thoughts about this because all the stuff with the campus protesting and just protesting in general if if donald trump were to win again do you think this is going to just be a great question just like a yeah redux are we just are we just doing this all

over again i think i i'm afraid so yeah i mean look nobody knows nobody can predict the future but you kind of what did um i yeah i guess so okay i mean listening you know like coddling american money it's like yeah it kind of did pretty predictive no i mean greg and i were trying to offer universities advice about what not to do not a roadmap for how to keep doing it so you know um so yeah that that sucks um but you know i started head i co-founded heterodox academy in 2015 while obama was president and obama himself had speeches where he said you know you know we should have some viewpoint diversity kids shouldn't be caught, like Obama was great on these issues. And then when Donald Trump, and I was, I was always a Democrat, I was always on the left, but sort of center left. And it was a little hazardous to start an organization saying, you know what,

we need more conservatives and libertarians in the professoriate. That almost has to come from that, though, and for anyone to care, right? Well, that's right, because conservatives have been saying it for decades. Yeah, duh, they think, yeah. So, it was a little risky for me to co-found this, and some people were suspicious of us, like, oh, are you just a front for the conservatives? Are you, you know, some right-wing thing? Like, who funds you?

And then the day Donald Trump got elected, my life got so much harder, because all of a sudden, especially the center-left people who were like, before they were like, yes, I love the academy, I agree, we need viewpoint diversity, we need to be challenged. All of a sudden, it's like, we're at war, we're being attacked, everything is racist, it's fascist, and anybody who is criticizing the left is on the right. And that is great untruth number three, right there. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. And all of a sudden, I was an evil person because I was not on board on the team.

Yeah, just because you're like, some things are fine. Just for you to say, oh, one of his policies is fine. Oh, I wouldn't dare say that. Or whatever. You're right. That's right. You're right. So at a university, of all places, we should have nuance.

We should be able to say, let's evaluate Donald Trump's economic policies. And even if you think he was bad, you should be able to say, well, this one actually worked. Like, you should be able to say that. But if your career depends on it, if you're going to be ostracized and called a fascist, well, then you're not going to say it. So anyway, my point is just that there was like a phase change. It was like, you know, like a red alert went off when Donald Trump was elected the first time, and the academic world got insane. And we really went much more insane during the Trump administration. And then, of course, that overlapped with COVID. And so, yes, I am very afraid that the progress I mentioned before, how in 2013, it felt like things are turning around. It feels like it's swinging back, all the DEI stuff, conversations that are happening.

That's right. You can talk about DEI now in a more open and honest way, which was very hard to do before. Especially in a college campus. So it does feel like things are opening a little bit. Like, we've gone through the worst of it. The fever has broken. Actually, that was the title of one of my essays for Heterodox Academy. The fever has broken. I think that's true.

But if Donald Trump wins the election, the fever will be right back, I think, I fear. That sucks. Yeah. So I know he's got to go, but you had a hard out. But the one thing oh i have one more if you have anything but one more thing i feel like i wanted to uh thought would be good to get your opinion on because you talked it was interesting that you talked a lot about with girls the big problem is you know uh posting too many photos of you and bad body image and

one of the many but that's one of the big ones yeah but with guys the big question is like porn and gaming but it seemed like when you did the research on gaming it like wasn't that conclusive that it's just completely bad for you and i feel like this is one of the biggest like most contested arguments like someone will say gaming's bad for you and people like kind of explode on them and then the best yeah so what is the actual like final let me share with you so because it is often gaming is often held up as a moral panic that was groundless and that i think is because the focus was on violent video games and first-person shooter games where you're going around with a gun and there was the common sense view was this has to be bad for a boy this is going to make them violent and that's not true playing violent video games does not make you violent okay so so that was a moral panic over

violent video games but within the data what i found by going back and looking at the studies trying to make sense of it is the boys who were spending five six hours a day were doing a lot worse than the ones who weren't so heavy heavy use is of course going to have consequences so that was true even before the modern era and the and the multiplayer video games um now since you know since high speed internet since whatever 2009 2010 whenever the multiplayer games became really popular um they're much more exciting much more immersive they're much better at keeping you on forever and so video games are now playing a role in boys lives oh and they're much more they

they can give you quick hits of dopamine much better than like when i was a kid you played pong and it was exciting but you know oh i scored a point yeah i scored a point like it wasn't like boom my brain is you know lit up with dopamine so um so what i concluded in in the book what zach and i concluded was we don't want to say to parents don't let your kids play video game we don't say that that would not be justified um but what we do want to say is if you let them play every day, you know, 5 to 12% of them are going to get addicted. It's called problematic use. So, you know, very few parents would ever let their kids do something that had that higher risk level.

So I think parents should be very careful about letting their boys play video games every day. Two or three hours a day on the weekends, I think is probably fine. And that way they're still part of the group, they know what's going on. So so that would be my advice i don't know as much about video games as i do about social media but you're right social i can't say you know social media i think is just horrible for kids what do you do phone wise to follow your own advice as like an expert about this yeah like what do you do do you have your phone all the time do you put it away well i'm very i mean i'm very different in that i'm kind of a workaholic and i'm always at my computer so i have you know I have two different computers at

home depending if I want to be on the sofa or my desk. I'm always at a computer. If you're writing, do you turn messaging off? Oh yeah, yeah, that's right. So just two years ago after reading Cal Newport, this wonderful book, Deep Work, I realized that I'm constantly getting interrupted. So on my computers, I don't know if I get a text. On my phone, I do. So for me, my iPhone is still just a tool. My iPhone is not my master because I'm not on social media other than a little bit on Twitter. And whenever I post something on Twitter, yes, I go back two minutes later and 10 minutes later and 20 minutes later. I go back and I check.

So I hate it. And I try to, you know, I have to use it for work. It has a lot of advantages to it. I mean, there's many good things about Twitter as well. So for adults to use these tools, to use these things as tools to advance their goals is fine. I have no objection to that. But for these tools to then use children to sell to advertisers, I have very strong objections to that. So me personally, I have no problems with my phone. My phone is, it's a tool, it's a Swiss Army knife. I actually

keep it with me in bed at night because I often listen to audiobooks to help me go back to sleep or go to sleep. So I have no addiction problems with my phone at all. But, you know, but many, but with my kids, I wish I'd been a little stricter. I didn't let them on social media. My daughter is 14. She wants Snapchat. I'm not letting her have that. No social media until 16 was the rule in my house.

But I wish I'd been a little stricter on saying when you're in the apartment the phone has to be on the counter you don't have your phone in the apartment you can do everything on your computer you can text your friends on your computer i wish i'd done that because my kids are uh my son's they're just more dependent on their phones than i would like i can't say for sure that it's bad for them but it's this uneasy feeling that most parents have that there's something there's something bad about them spending so much time hunched over a phone hell yeah okay well that's awesome the book is the well i was going to look at it the hold that up there you go generation by jonathan height anxious generation another hit yeah thanks for coming by man thank you my pleasure guys and i hope i hope listeners and viewers will go to anxiousgeneration.com

where we have a lot of resources a a lot of information about the book. And also subscribe to my sub stack, afterbabble.com. That's where we put out all kinds of essays, research, follow-ups to the book. And you support the bad voice community. Oh, yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah. There is hope. There are great medical treatments.

And you can join the fraternity of people who have learned what it's like to be without a voice. Thanks, brother. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Great fun.