The Checkup with Doctor Mike - An Honest Conversation About Looksmaxxing | Jonathan Haidt

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

I'll teach you how to become the media's go-to expert in your field. Enroll in The Professional's Media Academy now: https://www.professionalsmediaacademy.com/Check out Jonathan Haidt's books here:The Anxious Generation: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/bookThe Amazing Generation: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book/amazinggeneration00:00 Intro02:13 Starting Kids Early12:05 Targeting Gen Z13:50 LGBTQ “Lifelines”19:30 Suing Social Media Companies22:40 Boys Suffering33:34 Defining Terms39:56 Phone Free Schools45:00 Vapes53:20 Gen Z’s Feedback1:00:55 Predictions1:10:20 Does Abstinence Work?1:13:50 Prediction MarketsHelp us continue the fight against medical misinformation and change the world through charity by becoming a Doctor Mike Resident on Patreon where every month I donate 100% of the proceeds to the charity, organization, or cause of your choice! Residents get access to bonus content, and many other perks for just $10 a month. Become a Resident today:https://www.patreon.com/doctormikeLet’s connect:IG: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/instagram/DMinstagramTwitter: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/twitter/DMTwitterFB: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/facebook/DMFacebookTikTok: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/tiktok/DMTikTokReddit: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/reddit/DMRedditContact Email: [e-mail] Producer: Doctor MikeProduction Director and Editor: Dan OwensManaging Editor and Producer: Sam BowersEditor and Designer: Caroline WeigumEditor: Juan Carlos Zuniga* Select photos/videos provided by Getty Images *** The information in this video is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content, including text, graphics, images, and information, contained in this video is for general information purposes only and does not replace a consultation with your own doctor/health professional **

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It's a new work day. What I'm seeing in my practice is boys coming in with all sorts of body image issues. Body image concerns that used to be typical curiosities around puberty or this passing phase of insecurity during puberty, which passes. But now it seems like this transitional phase during puberty insecurity is now becoming a lifelong identity crisis, or at least feels like it. Why do you think that now transitions happen? Yeah. So suppose you have boys trying to evaluate it. themselves, where am I in among the other 15 boys in my class? And there are lots of ways that I

could be cool or not. There are lots of different sports that maybe I could be good on. And so I'm not automatically condemned to the basement here forever. And then you put them in a world in which there are all these signals and it's overwhelmingly based on your looks. Now that was always that was long been true for girls. So it's horrible for girls. But now it's becoming the case for boys because you don't even get to show off your athletic prowess. It's how do you look? Do you look masculine, tough, dominant? You know, it's like you were happily enjoying child, and now you're thrown into this seething cauldron of middle school and suddenly renegotiating this.

And you're looking for guidance to where? To your parents? To the people in your community? No. To the streamers and social media people who are the most extreme who have been able to garner the most likes. So it's sick. It's cruel.

Welcome back to the Checkup podcast. Today's guest is the world-renowned social scientist Jonathan Haidt. He's emerged as one of the more popular thought leaders on children's screen time and social media overuse. He's written bestselling books like The Anxious Generation and now The Amazing Generation, which is specifically targeted at 9 to 12-year-olds, empowering them to have control over their devices

instead of being controlled by them. I've spoken to Dr. Hype before about the struggles young people face today as they grow up in a world dominated by bottomless feeds and predatory algorithms. I've invited him back on the show today to talk about something more specific. The struggles I'm seeing in my practice

from adolescent boys who are falling victim to look maxing, the manosphere, where this relentless wave of male influencers are preying on the body image issues of young boys, and it's truly leading to some major concerns. Dr. Haidt, the world is a scary place. And getting scarier, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. But you seem very relaxed and happy. Well, you know, each of our lives are not really made up by what's going on in the world.

True. You know, our happiness and our engagement is really very local. And I'm just really blessed to live in a great place. I love living in New York. I'm working with a great team or working on this big problem of how to restore childhood. So if I seem relaxed, I'm not really relaxed, but I am pretty engaged these days. It's interesting to hear you say the word local because I am afraid that the word local no longer exists. in the age of which we live with social media,

everyone looking at their phones, it seems every international problem is now a local problem. What does that do to not just a developing brain, but anyone's brains? So, you know, I'm going to play with the, well, I'm a social psychologist who also loves evolution and anthropology. I love looking at what is human nature, how does it vary? And, you know, our environments have changed gradually over,

thousands of years, but all of a sudden, things are changing so quickly that a lot of our evolved systems that evolved for life in the physical, real world, they're wildly malfunctioning in this virtual world. Is there a specific example of when they malfunction or how they malfunction? Oh, sure. Okay, so let's start right in with the biggest area of all, which is relationships. You know, originally, everyone said, you know, social media, oh, you know, you can connect to everybody. you can have thousands of friends. And when I started this campaign two years ago to roll back the phone-based childhood

and raise the age for social media 16, people are, oh, but it's how they connect, it's how they find friendship. Okay, so if you have no understanding of human nature and you just think, hey, if I can connect with a thousand people, I'll be better off than if I only connect with three. But that's not the way we work.

Human relationships are between people who have bodies, and if you think about what friendship was like when you were a kid, you know, you share food and that bonds you together. You share a lot of laughter. I remember just laughing constantly with my friends and joking. Share laughter has really deep physiological and even hormonal effects, whereas like liking each other's post doesn't do it. We move together in time. You know, girls play patty cake or we do physical things responding to each other's bodies. And in the process, we come to love that person. Strip all of of that away, give every kid thousands of shallow friends, and what do you have?

An incredibly lonely, not just generation, but an increasingly lonely world. Why is the body such an important part of that equation to develop a meaningful relationship? Is there a world where perhaps that was the world we grew up in, but not the world Gen Z or even Gen Alpha grows up in and that could be okay? Or is the body a part of the equation that's mandatory? That's right. In theory, what you say is true. And of course, you know, we haven't lived in the environment that we, you know,

the environment we adapted to or evolved in was the savannas of Africa. Obviously, we haven't lived in that way for a long time. So we are adaptable. But as we've moved to different places, we recreate, we do things. So we create villages. We have a local community. You know, I live here in New York City. You know, and Greenwich Village is kind of a, you know, you get to know the shopkeepers.

So we recreate things. Okay. is the body so important? Let's start looking at human beings from a different perspective. We think of ourselves as minds, as brains, where this great intellect that is sort of on top of this body, oh, I better take care of my body because that's just like the tool that gets me around. But really, you know, I'm in here. I'm in my head. Well, actually, you know, brains are 500 million years old. They've been evolving for a long time to run bodies. And a lot of your brain is involved in representing the nerves coming in from your body,

we think using representations of our bodies, we use metaphors from our bodies. And so to suddenly put people in a world where you're mostly just sitting and looking at a screen, and that's your social life, you know, for adults like you and me, I mean, maybe it will be okay, but for kids whose brains are developing

and expecting millions of faiths, to face social interaction. If you remove 70% of those, the outcome's not going to be good. Yeah. You know what's interesting to me in this dilemma that if I was to make a prediction, I would say that people who would have the hardest time in this current generation would be us because we didn't grow up with technology around us and we grew up with bodies. So therefore, we're forced to adapt to a new online digital world. And that could be quite hard. Whereas if you're younger and you're growing up in this world, perhaps you're more accustomed to it and more comfortable.

But it seems to not be playing out that way. So again, what you're saying makes a lot of intuitive sense. And 20 years ago, I think a lot of people believed that. And I still hear people saying, oh, but, you know, I mean, they're going to live in this digital world. They're going to, their workplace, they've got to. So let's start them early. You know, if my kid, if my kid gets started, you know, on social media when he's seven,

he'll be really well adapted to master that world when he's in. adult. Okay, it's it makes sound a little intuitively compelling. If you start your kid on piano earlier, I guess that will help them go further. But what we're seeing now is that the idea of a digital native was a horrible idea that if you raise kids without normal social experience, without a lot of running around, loud a lot of sunshine, without a lot of normal wrestling and touching, if you raise them like with computers instead that they'll somehow come out better? No. The technology is incredibly easy to use. If you took you know, Amish kids who are whatever, you know, people who'd been raised with no technology

whatsoever. And then you put them in this world at the age of 18, you know, how long will it take them to learn to use social media or AI? A few weeks, maybe a few months. And they'll be way ahead because their brains will have developed the ability to pay attention and to have relationships. Whereas what we're seeing, I don't want to overstate it. Look, most kids are not mentally ill. Most kids are okay. But on average, on average, what we're seeing is a general. generational decline in many really important human abilities. It's common throughout the English-speaking countries. It's common throughout the West, maybe a little bit less so.

There's an interesting debate now about why the English-speaking countries are doing worse. We don't yet know about the developing world. What we're talking about is a reduction in human potential at a scale vaster that has ever been seen in history. I mean, okay, hard to compare to the black death and a third of people dying, but at least in modern times. generally speaking, we've increased human capital. We've increased human ability steadily over a couple of centuries.

Now it's declining. Do you think that when children spend a lot of time in this digital world, they become digitally native, that is problematic because they have to spend time in the physical world. Exactly. Whereas if you become well accustomed to the physical world, you can dabble in the digital world because the physical world is still the majority of the time that you're spending with social

situations. I see what you're saying. But again, I would go further than that. The, the child, so infancy is this amazing thing. How do you get a large brain into a tiny package that can actually come out through the birth canal of a woman? Okay, that's an incredibly complicated, you know, almost impossible task. And so we have, you know, infancy and we have this long, long childhood. The point of the long, long childhood is to give the brain time to scaffold its development. And so the kid, they first have to crawl and then they can stand and then they can, you know, you have to go through things in order. And if you just, you know, take a six-month-old and you say, okay, we're going to skip all that.

We're going to go right to, you know, bicycling or riding, driving a car. Like, no, you can't do that. You have to develop, the brain has to develop skills in a certain order. and if instead of all that physical engagement with the world, kids love to run around, climb things, they need to develop the physical skills of living in a world of predators and prey where they, what are the games we play as kids?

Tag, sharks and minnows, they need to practice all that stuff. And then you get a properly developed human mind that's capable of dealing with the world. The brain changes speed up during puberty. The brain's changing even faster during puberty. and then it slows down. Late teens, it slows down, it's kind of more or less done

from a cortex by age 25. You have to go through that developmental period. If you say instead, we're gonna give you the childhood experiences of a cat, or you know, that would make no sense. Your brain wouldn't come out right. And so to say, oh no, we're gonna give you the childhood experience of a digital native.

No, don't do that if you want, so here's the thing. Parents, let me, I'll look right at that camera there. Parents, if you want to prepare, to prepare your child for success in the digital future, protect their brain development in the present from the ravages of a digital childhood. Let them make real friends face-to-face, no AI friends, let them spend a lot of time with other kids, let them run and play. If you put them on devices early, you are not giving them an advantage. You are interfering with their brain development

and there is a chance that that effect will be long-lust. If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies. Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad-free? Don't worry, we get it. Every $20 ticket could win you $3,000 a month for life and supports life-saving cancer research at the Princess Margaret. Feel free to buy your payday for life ticket today.

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Do you think I've seen some criticisms of the idea that the digital generation is being unfairly targeted, that it's not just social media, it's not just digital. There are other factors at play. And perhaps it's how you interact with social media or are you an individual who is struggling with mental health, therefore seeking out social media. Do you find any of those arguments to be fair? Well, first of all, there certainly is no unfair targeting of Gen Z. I mean, we're all, you know, my kids are Gen Z.

Most of us in this game have kids who are Gen Z are now Gen Alpha, born after about 2011 or so. And so none of this is targeting. All of this is an attempt to turn around trends that are extremely alarming. And as I've traveled around the world, talking about this, what I found is that wherever I go, if there is a country in which kids have devices, meaning pretty much every country on earth,

you have the same fight within the family. You have the same addiction going on. The devices work the same way on developing brains. Quick dopamine, quick dopamine addiction addiction. That's universal human experience of growing up with touch screens. That wasn't true for television. Television isn't the quick dopamine, quick addiction thing, but now it is.

And so there's no issue of unfair targeting. There's the recognition that technology, we've always had a complex relationship with it, and it's always been mostly positive with some negatives. And my argument is that something new happened by the early 2010s, the smartphone, the touchscreen, all of that, has created a digital environment that I think is mostly damaging to development with some positives.

Do you think it's interesting that, I believe last year, JAMA published a report on this, pointing out that they believe there's not enough evidence to say that there's a causative relationship between social media and harm to a developing mind. Their stance and the author stance largely is that there's problematic use and not all screen time is the same and that there are many who use screen time or high levels of screen time and actually do quite well.

That's all true. People who use social media to find communities where they are otherwise left out by their peers, they find joy in being on social media and finding that connection. So why do you think that they're not fully saying that there's a causative relationship? Great. Let's go through it because it's really important for people to understand a few aspects of the scientific debate here. So let's start with the argument that social media is a lifeline. That's the word you'll hear. Social media is a lifeline for LGBTQ kids. This is a talking point pushed by META and others to try to inflame sentiment on the left. And then they say any regulation is censorship. They say that to inflame people on the right.

You know what was a lifeline for LGBTQ kids? The internet. If you were gay growing up in a rural area in the 80s, that was horrible. You were isolated. So when the internet came in in the 90s, LGBTQ kids, it was a lifeline. They could get information instantly. They could find a variety of place where they could interact with people. And the internet that we had in the 90s, I don't see any sign that that was harmful or toxic.

So the internet is incredible, and the internet solved those problems. Now fast forward to 2012 and later. Now what do you have? What did LGBTQ kids gain by adding onto the internet an environment in which you have algorithms feeding you stuff and connecting you to men who are sexual predators? Meta has had very lax policies around kicking people off, even involved in sexual trafficking. They had a 17-strikes-in-year-out policy, according to one of their first. former employees.

So the issue isn't, oh, you know, kids in marginalized communities, we'd isolate them if we took away social media. No, they'd have the rest of the internet. They wouldn't have the worst part. And the research shows very clearly that the people who are most harmed, who say that they are most harmed, are LGBTQ kids. So, yes, they use it a lot more. They encounter many more sexual predators.

They're much more likely to be extorted and pulled into sexual trafficking. So please don't confuse social media, which is one of the worst parts, along with gambling and porn and a few others. Don't confuse that with the internet. The internet has a lot of advantages. Okay, now, then the larger point is there is a scientific debate.

There are a number of researchers who say, well, they don't say that social media is safe. What they say is there's a correlation. We all agree that people use it a lot or more mentally ill. Everyone agrees about that. But some say, well, but maybe it's that. people who are more mentally ill, they seek it out to find community.

Right. Okay, well, first of all, that wouldn't explain why as soon as kids got on social media around 2012, the girls got on Instagram, wouldn't explain why at that point, then that's when mental health tanked. But even that's a correlation,

that's a historical correlation. Two things happen at the same time. What my lab has been doing is we've been gathering the evidence of causality. How do we know that it's not just a correlation? How do we know that it's causal? and actually this is what we do in science. I mean, this is not an impossible task.

So I'll just list. I mean, I could spend an hour talking about this, but I'll just list. Here are the different kinds of evidence that it's causal. So first, there are now over 30 micro, we found 38, I think it is, experiments where, you know,

random control trial, you ask some people to get off social media, and then you see what happens to mental health. And overwhelmingly, they find benefits on, there's not a single measure where we found that it was harmful. So there are experiments. And that's the- But the issue with those is the short-termness of it all.

Because the adaptability and plasticity of a mind showing how perhaps they can feel really great of taking a dopamine break, you know, one of these dopamine vacations. And then after the week, the benefit kind of goes away. Does that stay? Yeah, but you know, I mean, the studies only go for a couple of weeks and there certainly isn't a sign of decay overall.

But sure, that's a theoretical possibility. But then we also have the natural experiments. What happens when high-speed internet came into different areas in late 2000s and early 2010s, it came into different parts of Canada or Spain or Germany or Italy? I mean, there are nine or ten studies now that looked at that, at the staggered rollout. What do they find?

My group and two totally different groups, all three of us have looked, at this set of studies, we've all found the same thing. When it came in, in the years after that, you get an increase in psychiatric admissions, especially for girls, girls and young women. So over and over, so that's another kind of causal evidence. This is not just a correlation. This is a quasi-experiment. Well, that could be causal evidence that some subgroup could have been harmed at a higher level. Yeah, young women. That's what we're saying. Young women are the, we're the first to get hit. Now, we'll talk about boys later because they're hit in a different way.

But yeah, if you focus on young women, I think the evidence of causality is now very strong and from multiple sources. But here's the other thing. You know, we're all confined to the correlational studies, the longitudinal studies, the experiments, and the quasi-the-natural experiments. Those are the four areas that we psychologists argue about. But there's so much more evidence. Okay. First, what do the kids themselves say? When you talk to older Gen Z and you survey them, are they grateful?

that they're digital natives? Do they look back and say, wow, social media was great? No, they do not. A lot of them regret it. Very few are grateful to it. You actually saw an interesting point there from Pew. They did some research on this, and it was like 60 or 70% believe that social media

was negatively impacting mental health of their friends, local communities. But then the second point of it, which was more interesting to me, is that only 13% believed they were being negatively impacted by that. So I'm curious why that is. Well, no, I haven't heard numbers that low recently. The most recent pew that I heard was, I came out of it, it was 20 or 30 percent of girls said it harmed their mental health. There are different surveys. But look, if you put a

consumer product out into the world that 30 percent of the girls who use it say this has harmed me, any other field, any other industry, they'd be sued to death. But this one had a special exemption from Congress that nobody could sue them until this year we finally got one case through and there will be many more to follow. But just to finish up on the evidence, if the kids themselves are saying this is harming us, and they have the front row seat, they're the only ones who really know what's going on,

and then who has the next best seat? Meta, they know exactly who saw what and when. My group, we've compiled reports about, there are, is it, 28 or 30, studies that Meta did that came out during the trials, during the trials in Los Angeles. So MET has done a lot of research, including an RCT, including a randomized control trial,

of getting kids off social media. So the kids have the best seat, and they say this is causing a lot of harm. META and other companies have the second best seat. Their own research shows that they're harming kids, and this is just like the tobacco companies, their internal research showed harm, who has the next best seat, the parents and teachers and coaches and therapists,

and we've collected all kinds of surveys of them. Good luck finding, you know, more than a couple who think that this is good for kids, especially kids with anxiety problems. So what I'm saying is, there is so much, there's so many different lines of evidence saying, this is hurting our kids. And there are still psychologists,

I understand, we're in a scientific debate. There's still psychologists to say, okay, but I'm not persuaded. It may just be, well, they can't say it's just a correlation anymore because there's so much experimental evidence. Oh, yes. Well, the multifactorialness of it all. Of course, okay, sure. Of course it's multifactorial.

So people sometimes accuse me of saying, Heights says that 100% of it was caused by smartphones. And every kid who, of course not. I'm a social scientist. What I'm trying to understand is when you get a generational change, a historical change in the averages from going up to going down, this is a global emergency.

Yeah. And you mentioned that now boys are starting to struggle with the social media world. the looks maxing trend that we discussed earlier. What I'm seeing in my practice is boys coming in with all sorts of body image issues. Body image concerns that used to be typical curiosities around puberty or this passing phase of insecurity during puberty, which passes. But now it seems like this transitional phase during puberty, insecurity is now becoming

a lifelong identity crisis, or at least feels like it, you have streamers that are fully cashing in on catching the attention of this age group 13 to 18 years old, especially in the male community, which is very unusual. Why do you think that now transitions happen? This is a great example of what we were talking about before, about how you sort of change the environment in which we live and all kinds of weird stuff happens. So elementary school for most kids is fun. It was fun for my kids. It was fun for me. I remember. And then you hit middle school and it's awful. Not for everybody, but it's really different. And because you're getting, you're leaving the world of just pure play and you're entering suddenly, you're entering a period and where everybody is now

evaluating everybody else and themselves, where do I fit? And now you have very gendered status hierarchies. Because it's at this point. I mean, I remember in elementary school, it was already the case that the cool, like the socially prestige, the dominant boys with the good athletes. It was that simple. If you're a good athlete, you're high. By middle school, it is still very much, it's physical dominance.

For girls, it's looks, and also social-centeredness. Who knows whose secrets, who's the girl that is sort of the center of things? So you have these new status hierarchies. That's been true for a long, long time, before social media. Okay.

So suppose you have boys trying to evaluate themselves, where am I among the other 15 boys? in my class. And there are lots of ways that I could be cool or not. There are lots of different sports that maybe I could be good on. And so I'm not automatically condemned to the basement here forever.

And then you put them in a world in which there are all these signals and it's overwhelmingly based on your looks. Now that was long been true for girls so it's horrible for girls. But now it's becoming the case for boys because you don't even get to show off your athletic prowess.

How do you look? Do you look masculine, tough? dominant. And so to put these poor kids who are suddenly, it's like, you know, it's like you were happily enjoying child and now you're thrown into this seething cauldron of middle school and suddenly renegotiating this. And you're looking for guidance to where? To your parents? To the people in your community? No, to the streamers and social media people who are the most extreme, who have been able to garner the most likes. So it's sick. It's cruel. We have to let our kids develop in a relatively normal human social environment. And once again, if you want to prepare your kids for this digital

future with so much cruelty in it, don't immerse them in it early. Protect their brain development through puberty. I've had guests on the show in the past that talked about the aesthetic revolution, the need for being honest with your kids about their appearance, which was a bit shocking to me. But, you know, I'd like to hear people out, even if I disagree with them. saying how those who are quote unquote ugly live on average a worse life. Their pay is lower. They experience more mental health conditions. They're more ostracized by friend groups.

And that by heavily investing into their looks, they can be saved from this or healed from this. I think healed was the word my guest used. What do you take from that? So it used to be the case that there were multiple ways that you could excel. What you said is absolutely right about their, one of the stronger prejudices that we have

is stronger than race or gender or I don't really gender, but is beauty. We do respond more positively to people who are beautiful or attractive. So there is some truth to that. And so to help your child become more attractive is not a bad thing, but to frame it around your child that your value is your looks. That's the most important thing. It sounds, again, kind of cruel to

me. Our kids need to develop along their different lines of excellence they can develop. And the more you focus it on looks, it's obviously horrible for girls. And now, as you say, it's happening to boys. Can you give us a little bit more detail? What are the boys, when they come to you, what do they want to do? What is it the, what is their psychological effect? Yeah, the psychological effect that I see playing out is there is an under-discussed male loneliness epidemic, even in younger males. Yeah. And when you start exposing them to the people who they look up to sharing this loneliness and hatred

for people isolating them and sharing tips for how they got out of it, it now fuels almost an addictive process of trying to get out of. loneliness by doing looks maxing. And to me, that is the exact opposite of what you should do or recommend to someone who is struggling with loneliness. You encourage them to connect. You encourage them to step outside of their comfort zone and overcome by giving them tools. And those tools are not plastic surgery scalples and peptide injections. And this is the reality in which we live. every single day, a teenager, maybe early 20s, individual asks me about peptides to make their skin clearer,

to make their muscles bigger, to make their muscles heal faster, recover from exercise. And I don't know where this came from, because it's a hyper-optimized version of wanting to look a certain way. But it really takes my mind to the idea of, you're not chasing a goal. you got to chase the journey. And that journey, that friction

that we oftentimes discuss when we talk about the topic of love as an example, it's a friction that makes it special. Versus what happens with those kids or 20-year-olds when they do get giant muscles, do they just continue on seeking more and more and more? To what end? And it reminds me of when I was growing up,

the steroid era was still happening. It was talked about in sports. Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, like it was top of conversation for us. But it was always something that we frowned upon. Almost how smoking is today. But yet vaping is cool and pouches are cool. So it's interesting how that shifted. And I think about this almost like bigorexia,

where you just constantly want to be bigger, stronger. And I don't know what to what end. And I don't know that this actually cures or helps with loneliness and all those issues that started the journey to be. begin with. So from a societal perspective, I think social media is definitely adding to this. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. The social psychology that I'll put on the table here is called prestige biased learning. So an interesting way to look at human beings, and this is from, in part from Joe Henrik, an anthropologist at Harvard. And he points out, he and his team, his advisors,

they developed the idea that if you look at humans as learning machines and the competition in evolution was always who can learn the best, who can learn the best, not just the fact, who can learn the best, what would you build into a mind in order to have children or, you know, humans that excel at learning cultural knowledge from previous generations? So one heuristic is copy what's common, when in Rome do what the Romans do. And so we're very good at saying, oh, what's everyone doing around here? Okay, I'll do that too. But trend set it, or trend.

Exactly. So trends, yeah. So that's very clearly part of human nature. And kids have always done that. And so if you suddenly expose them to a world in which everyone is pumping iron or everyone is, you know, every boy is talking about his abs or whatever it is, then they're going to feel like, oh, I need to do that too. But it gets worse.

Because there's a second learning algorithm or learning, what does you call them, learning heuristic called prestige biased learning, which is don't just copy the average. Don't just copy what people are doing. Look around who do people think is high status? Him? Okay, I'll copy him. And this is the birth of celebrity, and this is why celebrities have hangers-on who want to be close to them and soak up things from them and get the credit from them.

So the idea that kids as young as 9, 10, 11 will be thrown into celebrity culture. where they're supposed to worship, you know, they're going to see that everybody else is pointing to these idols. So I'm going to be like them. Now any weird goal

could be put into your child. And so one weird goal is just be as big and muscular as you can. Now obviously that's going to relate to deep evolutionary systems about appraising masculine. So it's not that it's totally arbitrary. But what kids aspire to be

when they hit this, period of middle school and puberty is going to be governed by prestige biased learning. So this is one of the main reasons why I think it's so important. Just raise the age for social media to 16. Really, it should be 18. This should be an adult only activity, talking with strangers and sending photos and videos with strangers, some of whom want sex from you. I mean, this should be an adult activity. But what I've tried to do as a social psychologist is to say, look, what we need is a norm that is widely followed. And I thought if I went for 18, we wouldn't get it, but I think 16 we can get.

16 is sort of the end of puberty for, you know, girls are mostly done. Boys are kind of finishing mostly. So just raise the age. I don't want to hear your arguments about, oh well, but some kids would be able to have this benefit and some, yeah, sure, some kids could. But this is devastating the entire ecosystem

of childhood for everyone. This should not be a part of childhood, nor should gambling, nor should pornography. these should just not be normal parts of childhood. But they are, right now they are. They are childhood to shot through with all of these vices because we just let it happen.

When you say social media, how do you define it? Because even I was on the, oh my God, the committee for effects of social media on adolescent health for New Jersey that Governor Murphy, the previous governor of New Jersey put together. And I was on that committee.

And one of the biggest struggles we had, had in creating this report was figuring out, are we going to call WhatsApp social media? Is YouTube social media? Is Netflix social media? Is video games? Are video games social media? So I'm curious how you think about it. So let's first let's talk about social technology.

There are technologies that let us be social, like the telephone. Good. No problems. Messaging, texting, WhatsApp. Mostly good. If you connect people, mostly good. Weird stuff happens. Kids get into large groups.

It takes on some of the feeling of social media. But I've never said anything about. restricting kids from WhatsApp or texting or other things like that. Social media, there are a lot of ways to define it, but the prototype is people have a profile that anyone can look up, they post content, that's the key thing. Users are generating the content. TV studios have to pay a lot of money to make content, but what Met and others discovered is, hey, let's just sort of motivate people so they'll make all the content that other people come to see. And then you have

users communicating, so there's a variety of features that put you into contact with people in this weird way in which especially if a lot of the contact is one to many. So if you're texting a friend, fine. If you're using WhatsApp with a small group, it's great, no problem. But if you are now trying to gain followers by doing whatever it takes to get followers, you are now putting yourself in a Skinner box. So BF Skinner, Behaviorist, found that if he created special boxes where he could train rats or pigeons very, very quickly. by giving them, you click a button

give them a reward every time they did a little something that he wanted then they do a little more then they turned a little further and eventually he taught them how to play ping pong he did amazing things. You can train animals

very quickly if you can give them quick rewards. And once you put kids into an environment in which they're trying things and looking at the response, trying things looking at their response, they're in a Skinner box and who has the button giving them rewards? It ain't you as the parent.

It's whoever is the most weird and extreme. Right. Now I don't want to be, to knock people of lots of followers, some people earned it, but those, but a lot of kids are in a desperate race to do whatever it takes to get followers. So it's user generated content, the hierarchy of the following, and is there, like, addictive dopamine, quick hitting? Not necessarily. You could imagine a form of social media that wasn't about quick dopamine, but the ones that we have,

because as meta pioneered the advertising driven business model, you know, at first, you know, apps were charging money, but then they all quickly discovered, you know, if you offer the app for free, but it's just paid for it by advertising people, you'll get millions of people taking your app. So once Facebook pioneered the advertising driven business model and others joined in, now the race is on to, I got to grab your eyeballs before he does. If I don't do everything I can to get you to stay on my platform, then he's going to get you to stay on his platform.

So that all begins in earnest in the early 2010s, that savage competition. And to throw kids into that, so kids' attention, kids' eyeballs are like the oil fields in Alaska. Like everybody's competing to let's sink a drill and let's suck it out before someone else does. So do you think that this is a problem isolated only to kids?

Or do you think this is playing a role on our minds in some way as well? Yeah. It is certainly playing a role in our minds too, but there's two reasons why I have focused on kids, three reasons, or two, three, and why I don't talk a lot about adults, although I'm beginning to a bit more

because adults are constantly saying to me, it's not just the kids, it's me too. When we come to attention in particular, it's all of us. But the reasons I focus on kids are twofold. The first is that kids are going through this massive brain change. I mean, from birth through puberty, and especially during puberty. And so whatever weirdness,

whatever weird scenario you're putting them in continually is gonna have much bigger effects and possibly permanent effects because their brain is literally changing from the child form to the adult form. The adult form can take many forms. You know, in different cultures, we have slightly different brains

in that culture got into, you know, our brain different from a Japanese person or an Indian person. So the importance of acting quickly for children is much greater than it is for adults. Adults, if we stop all this stuff, we'll get our brains back. our brains aren't being changed very much.

It's our habits that are making it hard for us to pay attention, but our brains will recover. Johann Hari has a great book, Stolen Focus, where he goes to Provincetown for three months for his summer and he gets his brain back. So that's one. The other is that we're a generally libertarian nation, and I have a lot of libertarian sympathies,

and I don't want to tell adults what to do unless there's a really, really compelling, a reason for it. Whereas we also live in a world in which lots of people are out to get children, predators, companies, people make addictive products. They're all out to get children as customers or victims.

And so we have a much more protective attitude towards children. And we know, and this was one of the amazing things that came out in the social media trials in Los Angeles, is that these companies, and here we mean meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. Those are the four companies. that thousands of parents are suing

because they damage their kids. We have internal documents from all of them about how they were trying to hook kids. They used the word addiction until I think in 2019 Meda sent out a memo saying, do not use the word addiction anymore because it could show up in documents. Call it problematic use.

Which, sure, that is actually perhaps a better term, but it still means compulsive use that you can't control and that leads you to live in ways that you don't want and that cause harm to you. So we know that they're all competing to hook kids. So that's the second reason is that we all agree we can protect kids. And then a third related reason is this is totally bipartisan. That's one of the exciting things about this.

This is one of the few topics in American life where Republicans and Democrats agree this is terrible what's happening. We need to stop it. We need phone-free schools. We need to raise the age to 16. We need to protect our kids from these predatory companies. Yeah. You mentioned phone-free schools.

I worked with Governor Kathy Hochle in trying to push this in New York. I don't know if you're aware because I work a little bit in the political spectrum. I think it's come out that the TikTok CEO, Adam Presser, is going and trying to reverse phone bans in schools. Who's trying to reverse it? The TikTok CEO.

Oh, good luck. Phone free schools are so popular with teachers. Teachers love it. There is no way that this is getting reversed. I think it speaks to the villain mindset that you're describing of these companies. Yeah, like if we ban cocaine and then the cocaine association says, no, don't ban cocaine. Like, come on, there's no way they're going to be successful. You know what?

I would agree with you intuitively, but then I see the FDA just approved fruity flavored vapes that are extremely popular with children. So I don't know what's going to have. Yeah. I mean, so there's a wonderful book called The Age of a Day. by David Cortright. It's fascinating. He traces out humans have always sought pleasure,

and it used to be, we had to work hard to get pleasure. You had to take down a beehive and get stung in order to get something sweet, you know? And that's slow dopamine. That's like you have a goal, you work hard, you get it, delayed gratification. Right, so that's all good. And that's what we evolve for.

And that's what we want our kids to grow up learning. Set a goal, work towards it, and when you get it, it will be sweet. Okay, but what's happened as we go into modernity, as we go into the age of discovery, and you've got ships going all around the world, and now you've got sugar, and you've got tobacco, you've got all these things moving around.

You get much more addiction, and you get market forces, you get companies that are trying to push it. And then we enter the industrial age, and now it's not just you have tobacco leaves, you have machines that can make millions of cigarettes in a day, and they're cheap, and they're pushed everywhere, and they were pushed on kids, and they were pushed in high schools

in the 50s and 60s. So you get this constant process of both the concentration of the reward so that you don't just have, you know, well honey's pretty darn sweet, but fruit is very good, but now like the kids don't even want fruit because there's so many sweeter things.

So you get the concentration, and that happens with drugs. You go from opium poppies to heroin to fentanyl. You get this concentration, and you get a removal of friction, as you mentioned before, or friction is part of life. We need a world with friction.

But what the digital world has done is say, how about you can have any vice you want, anytime, no shame, instant. You want porn, you got it. You want gambling, you got it, it's everywhere. You know, you want nicotine, it's everywhere. So we're creating, we're going down this road that Courtright describes, and we desperately need,

this is one of the major roles of government is to prevent a free market society from having competition, competition is usually good among firms, but competition to hook kids before the other guy does, there's no way to stop that as a race to the bottom other than government saying, stop it, stop it. Why do you think our government's not doing that? Well, that's our government, yes, yes.

I guess we do have a government. Actually, this is important. State governments have been amazing. And kudos to Kathy Hokkel, kudos to Governor Murphy. And this has been totally red state, blue state. I mean, I've talked with a lot of governors. Most of them are acting on this. Most states have now passed phone-free school legislation in some form.

So the governors are doing great. We do have state governments that work. Our Congress, of course, is a mess. It was designed one way, but it has ended up another. And it's so cheap. I mean, people marvel at how cheap it is to buy influence in the U.S. You know, you don't need tens of millions of dollars. You can do it for a lot less.

So I don't know what happened with the FDA. I have no idea. I don't want to comment on the FDA. But at least with Congress, META and others, they spend a lot of money, and they can stop anything in the house. And that's what's been happening. I'll fill you in on the FDA situation.

I think it was as simple as some of the nicotine execs golfing with the president and asking for this passing to be made. And it's so destructive, given the fact that we had the most recent outgoing FDA commissioner on the podcast, talking about the problems that kids face. Now we're reinventing the problem. And this topic of friction has come up so often on the podcast. And usually we're talking about it in the sense of a positive way,

that friction creates love, delayed gratification. But friction also stops problems. So what is unique about our previous pandemic that we just had, and I say previous, because who knows what's coming in so for us. The reason why SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spread so widely and so wildly, is because of a... asymptomatic spread. Friction was reduced.

Okay. So people who were feeling okay were walking out and spreading this virus. Whereas SARS-cove-1 was nearly lethal. So those people were very sick, created lots of friction for spread, didn't spread as readily, was lethal. A lot of people died, but not as many people died with SARS-cove-2. Yeah, that's interesting. So when I think about vapes as an example, to me, it's very, very obvious from scientific literature that vaping is less harmful than true cigarette smoking. I think that's a fair point to say. But it's not a zero game. They're still bad for you. And there's issues with addiction. Yeah. You're changing your dopamine system. Incredibly,

especially at a sensitive time. But what is frightening to me is that there's no friction. Yeah. They don't smell really bad. Oh, yeah. There you go. You can do them in secret. That's right. There's no shame. There's no shame. Like what's cigarettes that exist today. The speed at which you can do it, you don't need to light anything. Smoke alarms don't catch it. You could vape at a park, you can't smoke at a park. Yeah.

So suddenly the friction is gone. The use case scenario expands. The addiction potential actually increases because the nicotine amounts in the vape are higher than that is what is found in a cigarette. So it's like this perfect confluence of events to make kids hooked on it. Yeah. That's really powerful. And the reason I'm smiling, as you're saying this,

is that you activated a memory that I think will illuminate the point you just made. When you was talking, the phrase occurred in my mind from my high school physics class. I remember the physics teacher, Mr. New was his name. And he was giving us a problem. He said, imagine a frictionless monkey swinging from a tree. Like, you know, it's like, okay. And then, okay. And then he says, oh, wait.

Imagine a frictionless world in which a monkey is swinging from a tree. And then he stops and he says, well, no, you couldn't have a frictionless world because it would fall apart instantly. Like nothing would hold together if there was no friction. And that's, I think, what's happening to us

with the digital transformation is that there used to be some friction for everything. You know, if you want to get your opinion out, lots of ways to do it, but you have to find a postage stamp or you have to write something. You couldn't just snap your fingers and have things happen.

But the technology has increasingly become like magic. You just snap your fingers and things happen. And if you want to do something, you can just do it. When we're talking about adults trying to do their work in the world, that's mostly a good thing. Like I'm all in favor of tools that help us adults do our jobs better. But when it comes to children, children need friction. The last thing you want is to make your child's life effortless and frictionless. And especially when it comes to vice, this is the thing that's so upsetting to me now. You know, when I wrote the book, I wasn't thinking about gambling. But then, but I was writing in like 2023 especially.

And then by 2024, 25, now it's everywhere. It's throughout, I mean, not young childhood, but, you know, high school boys are, I mean, they used to watch sports a lot and talk about sports. And now it's a lot of it's about the betting. You don't have to be 18 to bet. There's all kinds of ways around it. And so, again, the, you know,

I just want every to understand, the technology has given us a world that has changed certain parameters so that in a way we're getting close to the vision that my high school, physics teacher had of a frictionless world, which everything's going to fall apart. Yeah, I think we've lost the system of checks and balances that we need to make a true, free, capitalist society work. Because the way that I imagine is there's all these forces that

constantly want to get more people to gamble, to spend more time on social media, to create addictive algorithms, vapes, what have you. And then it used to be that the government would be able to be the force that ends that and says, oh, we've got to have some controls in place. We've got to regulate this so that we don't create a race to the bottom. But instead what has happened, the capitalist forces that got so strong that they're now buying the government from stopping them doing these things. And until we, I think, become more aware of it and call it out publicly, I don't know where the buck will stop.

I think you're absolutely right that there are regulatory systems that we've developed over a couple of centuries that will encourage economic dynamics. We want people to innovate, start companies, invent products, market them, sell them, advertise them. We want that all to happen. But you have to have conditions that encourage efficient markets where there's no monopoly, there's no external costs foisted on people who weren't part of the transaction. There's all sorts of things you need to have a vibrant free market society. And over time, we developed those institutions, and the FDA being really a great example of one. But we've also always been subject to corruption.

Every system is. And as money has played a larger role in our politics, and of course it did in the 19th, it's not that this is new, but it fluctuates. But as money is playing a huge role nowadays, it's very easy, it's so easy to buy influence, I think our health, our public health, and our children's health is being sacrificed.

in a really dramatic way. And so, but here's, okay, but you know what? I've been pretty, I've been so dark so far. I was about to say, end stage capitalism is in my head right now. Because it is, you know, because like, you know, you start studying one problem, like, okay, social media and depression,

and then you find out, wait, no, it's social media and gambling and porn and all the dopamine things, and it's all these outcomes and it's attention. So like the problem keeps getting bigger and bigger. But let me turn this around by saying, here's the amazing thing. We're actually working on it.

Like we're actually making incredible progress in the last year or two. So when I started this, my book came, you and I talked, I think soon after the book came on 2024.

And, you know, people thought it was crazy. Like, oh, well, you're going to raise, what, you're going to have an age limit for social media? Good luck.

How are you going to force that? People thought it was just crazy to think that we could change this. And it's, oh, you know, the trains left the station. You know, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. It's, you know,

so people just, there was a fatalism. was a sense of resignation. We can't change this. But an amazing thing happened, which is that the mothers of the world were so upset by this already. The mothers were felt that they felt their kids being pulled away. And I think they felt it more than fathers did on average. And so as soon as as my book came at 2024, and this was around the world, even countries I didn't go to, whenever it came out, groups of mothers would form or were already beginning to form. And they we jumped into action and they started demanding action

and they started getting phone-free schools and raising the age to 16 in countries around the world, especially Brazil, Australia, in the UK. So much happened really quickly, driven by the mothers. And I'm so excited by this because authoritarian countries are better able to deal with this so far. China, they look at this and they say, okay, we're putting on time limits, Chinese kids can only play

an hour of video games. I can't remember the rules, but there's very tight restrictions. they can do that in authoritarian country. Democracy is much more vibrant. I love America. I care a tremendous amount about what's happening to American democracy. I want to make it vibrant and strong. And if we can't handle this,

if we can't protect our own kids from what is now clearly damaging their development, then it's kind of game over for the Western democracies. And you said at the beginning, you said you seem, you know, you seem relaxed, you seem like a good spirit. And part of it is we really are, making so much progress. And so even though Congress has been disappointing, but the states have been

incredible and countries around the world have been amazing and families across the country and around the world have been acting. So I think we are seeing a resurgence of a kind of a democratic vitality or vibrance when people are discovering, wait, we can change our local school. Oh, wait, we can change the law in our state. So I am actually really excited. It's exciting time. It's a scary time, but it is an exciting time because there's some... Staples Preferred Business Membership, built for busy business owners, because you've got bigger things to think about. With Staples Preferred, get free delivery, no minimums.

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countertrans. Yeah. From the countertrend perspective, what I'm seeing is there's a little bit of user fatigue of social media. And platforms are trying unique things like Instagram just launched this new feature called Instance, where you try and share something in the moment so that you're in the moment, creating a specific tailored version of who you are. And I don't see huge uptake. I see people being proud that they don't have social media profiles. I see more and more accounts being private where they only have 100 friends, more like how social media started from the MySpace era.

So that's interesting. I'm curious from the Gen Z perspective, what has their feedback been to you about your work? Yeah. So we have a new book out called The Amazing. generation. Your guide to fun and freedom in a screen-filled world. And it's for kids eight to 13 who might be just getting phones. And the book is not just about like, oh, you know, don't grow up on phones. It's about living an exciting life with your friends in the real world, doing things

in the real world. And in the book, we interview, we have little snippets from interviews with older Gen Z. Older Gen Z is so important because they're not turning 30. The oldest of Gen Z are turning 30 or 29 this year. And when kids read all these young adults saying, I missed out on my childhood, you only get one childhood and I spent it, you know, a scrolling, or one young man said, I wish, you know, I wish I had gotten know my grandfather better before he died instead of always being on my video game when he came over. This kid didn't get to know his grandfather. And so the wistfulness, the tragedy that so many young people see is really powerful for, for the younger kids.

I have spoken at so many universities and a lot of high schools, and I always give my presentation and then I always say, okay, members of Gen Z, raise your hand if you were born after 1995. Some raise their hand. I said, okay, just you,

did I largely get this right or wrong? I mean, did I, I've said some things that are, that paint a negative picture of generation, please tell me, do you think I largely got this right or wrong? In all the time I've done it, maybe three hands have gone up to say wrong. Like, they know, that's the thing, Gen Z, they are not in denial,

they know that this is bad for them. And so when they see a way forward, now they're really acting. There are a lot of Gen Z groups now. If you go to Anxiousgeneration.com, we have a whole page of aligned organizations. There are dozens and dozens of groups started by members of Gen Z to come together in the real world.

There's the Luddite Club, we started at two high schools in Brooklyn. Design it for us is one that's been around for a long time. So Gen Z is really getting active here. You know, it's interesting, you're talking about feedback in speaking at schools. I had this previous conversation with a gentleman talking about appearance and how it impacts a worldview. And I was partially playing devil's advocate, but also standing up for my patients that struggle

with anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia. I was explaining that working on your mental health doesn't necessarily require working on your aesthetic version of yourself. I was explaining that cultural norms change widely and that what is beautiful in one place might be not beautiful in another and how that shifts. And I was trying to just create an alternative viewpoint

to my guest and yet a lot of the comments were unhappy with the fact that they believed I was disconnected from reality or from their reality. What is the correct way to speak about this? Because I know you have a lot of experience for me to get better in communicating there? Or is that just a problem?

No, that is super interesting the way you put it, because what I've seen, you know, is members of Gen Z are very receptive to my arguments about what, you know, this is a problem. But then they can't, a lot of them can't imagine there's an alternative. They say, well, but if we don't have social media, how would we connect?

You know, they've only known it. And so they can't understand that before, you know, before 2010, you know, there was some Facebook, but people that called each other, they texted each other. You know, you have so many ways on the internet, and you can get together in person. So I've seen a sort of a, because, you know, because this is all they've ever known, and it's totally overwhelming and encompassing, and then you say, hey, how about we take away this world

and give you a better one? They're like, I can't imagine what that will be. And I think it's the same thing here for boys growing up or, you know, kids growing up in this, like, it's all about your looks. It's all about your looks. You know, like, oh, you're out of touch. Like, that's just the way it is. No, that is not the way it has to be.

They're right that that's the way it is. It does not have to be that way. That's the message that my movement is trying to convey, and that's what we're actually making some progress, because nobody really wants it that way. It's called a collective action trap. Nobody wants it to be this way. But if anyone opts out and says,

I'm not going to work on my looks, well, now they're at a disadvantage in some ways. But I think a better way to respond to that line of argument and that fellow who advocated everyone working on their looks, let's just spend a moment talking about what leads to happiness, because we actually know a lot about that. the whole field of positive psychology is about that. What are the conditions of human flourishing?

And it's not rising in status on this one dimension of looks. It's the degree of embeddedness that you have between yourself and others, yourself and your work or something productive, and yourself in something larger than yourself. This is, at least this is the conclusion I come to in my book The Happiness Hypothesis. I synthesize ancient wisdom, modern psychology,

but it fits with Sigmund Freud, who said love and work are the two key areas. I mean, there's, so the point is, we wanna raise kids and we wanna be ourselves, people who have lots of real, of close relationships, not a huge number, but close. We have close relate, we are embedded, connected, and we do something that matters to others.

We have a job, we care for kids, we're doing something, you know, teens who have chores, who are, so we have to matter to other people. And we, especially, thrive when we feel we're part of some sort of a larger community or a moral order. We need an overarching moral framework. So if those are three conditions for human flourishing, what is the technology done to it? Relationships?

Shallow, swipe-based, the more connected people are, the lonelier they are, because it's replaced human relationships, not augmented them. Work, a sense of purpose and meaning that you matter to others. AI is threatening to take away vast numbers of jobs. The technology routinely makes it that we don't need anyone else. You can have an AI friend. You can have an AI girlfriend, boyfriend, sex partner. So the technology is in many ways dehumanizing us

by blocking relationships, blocking our ability to matter to others, and shredding any common moral framework or moral canopy under which we can have a sense of coherence. So this is the world that the technology is taking us into. And I think we're beginning to see an awakening. I mean, the fact that a number of commencement speakers were booed recently because they mentioned AI, you know, people are, I think there is a tech lash. And even though I was always very techno-optimist, my whole childhood and all the way into the

2010s, you know, I think that technology is now really dehumanizing us. And I'm inspired that people are beginning to see this and take action. What do you think the three trends we can expect over the next 10, 20 years in this space would be? Analog schools is for sure one. AI resistance becoming a political movement, probably with more violence, and an unfortunate class divide over protecting kids. So the class divide is this.

Think about obesity and junk food. 20th century comes, foods everywhere, junk food's everywhere. Then eventually we have a movement to sort of stop eating junk food. Okay, what's the class divide? It's the upper class people, college educated people. They're trying to eat healthy. They're trying to avoid junk food Working class lower class people are not they're not in that. They're also financial constraints and so obesity Which used to or you know heaviness used to be a sign of wealth. You could afford food

But since the 20th century it's the sign of class wealthier people are thinner. They're able to avoid certain vices So that's what we learned from the 20th century and GLP one access Exactly, there you go. There you go. So the rich can do all sorts of things to protect themselves and their kids and the poor have fewer resources

and are not as likely to respond to those health messages. I'm curious on that class divide issue. Have you seen any trends on the social media side of things? Are poor kids more susceptible to the harms of social media? So one thing that we know for sure is the usage stats. So Pew and Gallup have good stats on, how many hours a day are you on? and then they break it down by class and gender and everything.

And the big differences are that girls more than boys are on social media. Girls is more than five hours at age as social media, boys are less than five hours. Class where kids in wealthier families have much less total screen time. Kids in poor families is much more screen time. Race, so black and Hispanic kids have more screen time. And I believe that's true even if you account for

if you partial out class. Those are two of the biggest ones. LGBTQ kids are on more than others. And so all of those groups are more vulnerable. And when I said a class divide, what I mean is especially a class divide in responsiveness. And so when the anxious generation came out in 2024, it made the rounds in all the fancy private schools,

the mothers who are really intense and focused on, reading the research and like do what it's good for the kids. And there's a lot of research showing that working class, lower class people, they have what was once called natural parent, natural growth parenting, the idea that your kid is not your pet project to soup up in me.

You know, like kids, you know, kids will do what they do. And so we're seeing a huge amount of uptake. So the four norms, the four norms that I propose in Anxonist Generation, no smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and far more independence free play responsibility

in the real world. Those four norms, sort of upper-class neighborhoods, you know, wealthy suburbs, huge uptake. Those parents are getting together. They're creating playbberhoods. Their kids are riding bicycles with each other. And I think what we're seeing,

you asked me for trends, I think we're beginning to see, so I expect that it will grow unless we can reverse it, is that wealthy families will increasingly be able to protect their children from digital harms, and the digital harms

will be concentrated in the bottom half or two-thirds of the economic distribution, which is tragic. And that's one of the reasons by phone-free schools is so important because it levels the playing field. It levels the playing field.

Because outside of school, the working class kids are on much more often. They spend much more of their lives on their buses. It's interesting because an advantage that I saw growing up, poor, we were on welfare in Brooklyn, going to a public school, was that the kids that were part of the richer families, they struggle to form connection and perhaps work through adversity as often. And there was actually an advantage to growing up as an immigrant. At least that's how I feel for me and a lot of my friends in the same time. group. And now that advantage is almost gone because when there's something so fun and inexpensive

and addictive that you could spend a ton of time on, why would you ever go and try and work hard? That's right. I think what you said is absolutely right. I believe I've seen research about that. And certainly there, you know, decades ago, there was so many cases of these rich schools, these rich neighborhoods with huge statewide rates and kids who are overwhelmed. And so I wouldn't have said that rich kids are healthier 20, 30 years ago, mentally healthier. But I think we're beginning to see that. Now, of course, it's complicated. The rich kids still have vast pressures on them for college and all of that. But in terms of protection from digital harms, there I think we do see a huge class divide. One way to look at it, and this is one thing that David Cortright

says, a metaphor that he uses, is companies are dangling hooks in front of kids. And these hooks are quick dopamine, anything that would give you a quick dopamine. And, you know, when I was growing up, I mean, you couldn't get porn. You couldn't buy it. You had a, you know, you couldn't gamble. Yeah, you'd steal a, right, from, you know, a cousin or older brother or something. You know, so, I mean, there were vices. Which that probably brought you together more than any harm from from seeing an argument. Unless you're too ashamed about it. But anyway, um, the point is, yeah, there were temptations, but they were few and far between. And now, our, especially, once the kids are online, imagine your son, especially, and this is more for the boys and the girls.

imagine your son just sitting there on a screen surrounded by fish hooks baited with the most delicious stuff. And they're all saying, bite me, bite me, no, bite me. And that's childhood. So again, I'm putting things in a kind of extreme way. I'm not saying this is literally what childhood is. But this is the change we've seen once everything went digital. Yeah.

It's why I think also marijuana use also disproportionately affects those of lower socioeconomic standing because in order to remove feelings of help, You can do a couple of things. You can work hard and get out of that helplessness and train yourself or you can numb it. Yeah. And numbing it can be done through digital forms where you distract yourself

or through mind-altering substances to make you not feel those issues. And when they're so widely available, especially as marijuana these days, I feel like it's a compounding issue. That's right. I just noticed when I was walking home from the gym the other day, you know, on Sixth Avenue,

and there's all these shops that sell, you know, you know, cigarettes and things. But they had listed, it was like every possible dopamine trigger. They didn't list porn. But they had like all these different products, all these different ways. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. You know, and who goes into them?

It's going to be a class thing. It's going to be, it's marketing to working class people to say, here, numb your, you know, numb your unhappiness. Well, at least we have your first two being a little bit more positive with phone free schools, more analog schools. And what was the second one remind me? So the first one I said, we're already getting phone free. school. So that's clearly going to happen. And there's just so many benefits from it. We haven't yet seen increases in test scores, but we're seeing a lot of other benefits, laughter in the hallways.

Teachers say that kids are more attentive. So that's going. The one I was referring to is now the next step is analog paths through school, especially elementary school. Because sure, you can get the kids off their phones, but they've got a computer sitting on their desk all day long. It's called one-to-one devices. So I've been careful not to talk. I've been careful not to talk. about ed tech until I knew more about it. In the book, I didn't say much about it. But now it's pretty clear, one-to-one devices. Put a computer on a kid's desk and doing a lot of the day there

is a really, really bad idea because it mostly ends up on TikTok, YouTube and video games. And so a lot of parents now are rising up and saying, get this the hell out of my child's life? Why is there an iPad on my kindergartner's desk? Why? There's no reason for it. So I think we're seeing a big push and that's, I think, gonna go national,

because it's just so obviously true. Kids need to develop basic skills. They need to learn to read and write. They need books and tablets and computers are just really bad for them for their education. Which is why AI is so scary. And I've spoken to some presidents of well-regarded institutions. We had dinner the other day.

And I asked them what their feelings on AI were. And it was very nonchalant of almost, well, I use it to help me write speeches so they can use it to write their papers. And I thought about it. I was just like, because you can do that because you already learned how to write the papers, but they don't.

So then I feel like the only solution here is some sort of in-person test-taking where you're doing oral examinations. That's the only solution. That's the only way to actually motivate them, it's not the only way to test that they have learned to think. So the way to think about this,

the great media theorist of the 20th century, like Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, they talked about how every technology is also an amputation. And so, you know, when we get, you know, calculators, we don't, we get less good at multiplying in our heads. We get compasses. We get less good at wayfinding. And there's all these skills that we can, that we're okay offload. Okay, we're not as good as our ancestors at finding our way around. You know, we can offload that.

But what AI is offering to do is how about thinking? How about you don't have to do your thinking? And I'm doing, I find myself doing this now. As soon as a question occurs to me, I just type in, I feel like, I don't want to, I just type in the question to Claude and it will tell me the answer. And okay, that's not so harmful for me because I'm already developed, but my God, I don't want my kids doing that. I want my kids to think and think and think hard.

I'm thinking in this day and age of, you know, when people argue whether drugs should be legal or certain drugs should be legal, they say that if you ban drugs, there is no taxation, there is no quality control, people buy stuff off the streets,

that forces into life of crime, criminalization, all the downstream effects of it. So in the world, if we do start banning, social media, I mean, currently we're talking about 16, perhaps it becomes later. Is there a world where like these four chans and these really dark places then start replacing a more acceptable version of it through meta or TikTok? So a couple of points.

One is the reason why social media is such a trap is because everyone's on it. So everyone feels they have to be on it. And if you close that down, we know this, I think we're seeing it in Australia. some digital substitution. Kids will go to other. They're not going to go outside and play necessarily. They're going to go to other things online. So some kids could go to worst places.

That's true. Some kids could. But if you break the trap and you free people so that they don't feel they have to be there, then, and we're seeing this in Australia too, there was an article a few months ago about a big upsurge in boys going fishing. Boys are actually showing up at the docks

and renting boats and they're going fishing because they're not on social media all day long. So yes, that could happen to some extent, but the overall effects are generally very, very positive. The next thing is the arguments that you just quoted that, you know, I've heard for drug legalization for a long time, and, you know, I was always very open to that.

And especially during the crime waves of the 70s and 80s, when there was a lot of crime around drugs, it seemed like, okay, you know, maybe we shouldn't have prohibition, maybe we should make it legal. Well, it's not working out very well. And a lot of the places that have done it really regret it, because they're discovering

exactly what you and I were just talking about. When you make addictive substances easily available, instantly to everyone, you get a huge increase in usage and addiction. And when you get usage and addiction, you get dopamine insensitivity. I just heard Anna Lemke. Have you had Anna Lemke on your podcast?

She's a wonderful addiction researcher at Stanford. She was just on with Cal Newport. And she just made it so clear any addiction, anything you're doing that's giving you quick dopamine is going to cause your system to counteract, you know, opponent process theories, and is going to cause dopamine... Tolerance and addiction.

It was dopamine... Dependence? Dopamine diminishment? Shoot. Receptor diminishment probably. Yeah, that's basically what it was. It was, anyway. So if we're saying, how about all of our kids from the age of...

of 12 can get every drug they ever want instantly. And that's Snapchat. You can get anything you want on Snapchat delivered. Dopamine saturation leading to downregulation. Yeah. That's what, yeah. Yeah. And so again, this is completely bonkers. Like, why are we doing this? We have to stop. Yeah. My current biggest concern, and obviously I'm a little bit biased with the social media of it all, given the fact that I try and educate people about health through social media. But you're not quick dopamine. Nothing about you is like, boom, boom, boom. Right, but if, if YouTube or TikTok or Instagram starts taking a hit and viewership decreases, it becomes very hard to make that your life's gone. It shouldn't even be about me. I'm talking about more government-wise and

intervention. What scares me now the most is these predictive markets. Yes. The Cal-She's, polymarket, all of these things. They snuck up on us. Snuck up and somehow widely, even, you know, we're saying predictive markets, but even draft kings, Coinbase are now bringing this in where it used to be like, okay, you're buying cryptos and it's this weird thing. It's already gambling. But now they added predictive markets into Coinbase. And I don't know why it's so culturally accepted. Where it used to be that gambling was bad and you should only do it if you have good control and 1,800 gambling problem was on the bottom of the screen. That has left society's mindset. Why do you think society doesn't worry about it as much?

So this is where, so the biggest thing that I think I don't talk about enough in explaining all of this crisis is the collapse of the moral canopy, which I mentioned before. But this is where David Brooks, Yuval Levin, there's a number of people have been writing about this brilliantly. When you live within a moral order that's capable of saying, you know what, gambling is bad. It offers a quick fix.

It ends up ruining families. Like, no, we shouldn't be gambling. Now, you don't want to 100% ban it because then you get various problems. It's in Vegas. You can get to Vegas, you can gamble, you can come back, a lot of friction. But if you have a coherent moral canopy, then you have a society that's capable of making judgments.

But because social media has shredded, now there are other things. It was already decaying. It wasn't just social media. But social media has played a huge role in just shredding any sense of agreement about what's true and what's good and what's beautiful. And so we are finding ourselves unable to make judgments

and unable to say, this is insane that we are throwing our children into a world of gambling and porn and nicotine. Is that because it's messing with our internal barometer? Normally you can tell what's hot and cold based on what your current level of experience with the temperature would be. So because of social media,

you're exposed to the most extreme negative and positive sides of things that now, oh, well, this gambling thing is not as bad as this extreme thing that my internal moral compass tells me. I mean, that may be part of it, but the thing that I'm focused on as a social psychologist who studied

the sort of the evolution and origin of morality is moral, Moral truths seem to us to be like facts. Like it's just obviously wrong, to kill people, to discriminate based on race. You know, there's also, it seems like, it seems like a fact of the universe. Now it's not, they're interesting emergent facts.

We can talk about that later, or some other day. But that's the way it feels. And so when kids are growing up and everybody agrees that, you know, that it's wrong to, you know, to harm animals or to, you know, or to gamble or to pee. or into your neighbor's window, whatever.

If everyone agrees, then our brains code that as, this is a moral fact. But when some people think animal cruelty is fun and some think it's bad and everything is like that. So it's a dilution principle. Well, it's that our mind, the young child's brain is, you have to see it as a learning machine. It's trying to figure out, how do we live around here?

What is the moral order? What is right and good? What is, the brain is trying to figure that out from the age of maybe six or seven and then desperately in the teen. It's trying to figure that out. And if we give it a learning environment, that's just all fragmented.

It's just all little videos. And the videos that they, I mean, the violence in the videos, the beheadings. Because you say that it needs to have universal agreement that something is bad, it becomes a moral fact. Yeah.

In this day and age of social media, there is no universal anything. Exactly. I can show you a picture of a stick. We can find arguments about it. So in this day and age, do we have this moral compass at all? Like, is that to decay the moral compass?

Individuals will, of course, we all still have a morality. but it's not operating in a field within which it was designed to operate or can operate well. And this is, again, why I'm so pessimistic about the technology. I mean, we need a radical rethinking of technology. And there are those who are saying, go faster, faster, faster. Any attempt to slow down AI will kill people because it'll delay the cure for cancer. And I say, the way we're going with AI is continuing what we did with social media.

It's shredding relationships. It's shredding attention. It's damaging education. And there is no way that we have to go faster to beat China. If going faster means we hurt our kids more and we diminish them more quickly, that can't possibly help us win the race with China. So I don't know the way out of this, but it has to start with a mass realization

that the technology that's being pushed on us now, while it gives us local benefits, has extraordinarily damaging effects on society and human development. Dr. Hyde, thank you so much. Sorry, I didn't on that down note. I think this is a very valuable conversation for everyone to hear because this is something we're wrestling with. And there is no quick fix.

There's stepwise approaches. And even though stepwise approaches have negatives to them because, as you say, good intention sometimes carry bad outcomes. So we need to constantly reassess all these interventions. But people are rising up, joining groups, raising their voices. We are seeing a lot of change really just in the last year or two. So I would just encourage people be part of that change. Guard your attention, guard your relationships, and use technology as a tool.

Don't let it use you. Where do you want people to follow along the journey? The central site is anxious generation.com. That links to all of our other projects, including letgrow.org, which is especially for parents with kids under about 16. And the amazing generation, which is the book, if you have kids between 7 and 13, Please check out. You can go to Amazing Generation.com.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Mike. I interviewed actor Jesse Eisenberg about why he chose to donate one of his kidneys to a complete stranger. So scroll on back a few episodes to check that one out. Jesse really opened up my eyes and I think you'll get something out of it. I would also love it if you can give us a five-star review. Maybe leave a comment telling me what you like to see more of on the show.

It's the best way to help us find new listeners and viewers. And as always, stay happy and healthy. Thank you.